Re: Objective-C and Smalltalk; speed of message send

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 10 Aug 2004, at 12:15, Alexander Malmberg wrote:

> As a final note, recent oprofile data from Matt Rice puts
> objc_msg_lookup at 15%-20% of execution time in messaging heavy -gui
> code. In other words, if message lookup was free, our programs would be
> ~20% faster. Significant, yes, but 20% really isn't that much.
>
>
> Thus, I maintain that message sending is really quite cheap. :) Except
> for performance critical code, I'd rather take a 20% performance hit
> than uglify my code with IMP caching, and I wouldn't shy away from
> messaging heavy code. :)

I'd like to add that I *strongly* agree with Alexander here.

I've had a lot of experience with this sort of optimisation over the 
years,
and while it's undoubtedly important for some of the key classes in the
base library, I now believe I tended to over-do the optimisations some
years ago when I was less experienced.

Optimisation efforts should be directed to improving algorithms rather
than speeding up messaging by caching method implementations.