objective-c: how slow ?

[Aurelien]

Hi,

I was just wondering what was the impact of messaging on the speed of an 
objective-c program. I've read somewhere about the @SEL directive (I'm 
not sure about the name), which allows for optimizing often invoked 
methods. But is there a possibility that the compiler does such 
optimization right away ? Is the @SEL "trick" an absolute requisite when 
optimizing programs ?

Does someone know about potential benchmarking results ? Has someone 
already tested the performance differences between programs written in 
C, Objective-C, C++ and Java ?

Is there a reason (performance...) why an objective-c runtime and (at 
least) the foundation library shouldn't be ported to an embedded linux ?

Aurélien