Objective-C has duck typing (if you want), closures, automated memory management and the ability to dynamically modify code. And is AOT compiled. GC can only

Objective-C has duck typing (if you want), closures, automated memory management and the ability to dynamically modify code. And is AOT compiled. GC can only "beat" malloc/free if it has several times the memory available, and usually also only if the malloc/free code is hopelessly naive. And you've got the micro-benchmark / real-world thing backward: it is JITs that sometimes do really well on microbenchmarks but invariably perform markedly worse in the real world. I talk about this at length in my article (see above).