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

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 19 Aug 2004, at 06:02, Travis Griggs wrote:
> > Also potentially fairly heavy, though a common choice.  I remember
> >  people complaining about NSString's performance compared to char* 
> > when
> > Foundation was introduced.  However, NSString is really for "human
> > readable" text, whereas char* is often more for "tokens", or really
> > just byte-sequences.
>
> Well, the problem is, you can't use char*'s as Dictionary keys. You 
> need an object. I guess we could roll our own lightweight string 
> object for use as a key. Then we'd have to manage all of the char* 
> life cycle ourselves.

OpenStep/GNUstep/MacOS-X has NSMapTable for this.

Actually, GNUstep also provides the non-standard macros in GSIMap.h for 
cases where performance is *really* critical, but NSMapTables are a 
good compromise.