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I honestly think you're wrong about message passing not being a bottleneck. I think there are things that people simply avoid because they'd be slow in Objective-C, and C isn't powerful enough. I am personally looking forward to being able to write more complex algorithms concisely and with high performance.

Also, you are completely ignoring the fact that CPU cycles aren't just about time - they are about energy. Increased performance means longer battery life, or more sophisticated apps that we can use all day.

I don't see how you can be correct about the IRC example requiring more glue code. Surely at the very least you need a table matching commands to selectors. How would this be any different to a table mapping command to closures or functions in swift?