Actually, Objective-C message sending is extremely fast, only slightly slower than a C++ virtual method call and in the same ballpark as a function call (the relative cost has drifted from 40% to 2x higher depending on OS version and machine architecture) without much of an impact on applications.<p>In addition, message-sending is extremely cheap compared to other operations, for example roughly 50x faster than object allocation.<p>Last not least, in the few cases where messaging does become an issue, it is trivial to replace with more optimized dispatch, ranging from an IMP-cached send to a static inline function depending on the performance requirements and API boundaries in question.