you rarely hear people complaining about messaging not being fast enough in Objective-C
There was a big spate of it ~4 years ago -- people had been using method dispatch in tight loops, and boggled a bit at the numbers when they started using Apple's fantastic Shark profiler. objc_msgsend is as cheap as dispatch can be without static linking (way faster than Python or Ruby), but it's still much more expensive than a C function call, and there's nothing keeping you from trading your square brackets and colons for parens and commas.
There was a big spate of it ~4 years ago -- people had been using method dispatch in tight loops, and boggled a bit at the numbers when they started using Apple's fantastic Shark profiler. objc_msgsend is as cheap as dispatch can be without static linking (way faster than Python or Ruby), but it's still much more expensive than a C function call, and there's nothing keeping you from trading your square brackets and colons for parens and commas.