I guess the phrase "prioritize performance" is maybe ambiguous. It's a language that cares a lot about performance, let's say -- sure, it uses dynamic dispatch

I guess the phrase "prioritize performance" is maybe ambiguous. It's a language that cares a lot about performance, let's say -- sure, it uses dynamic dispatch for its method calls (losing a little speed compared more-static C++ virtual methods, which themselves lose a little speed compared to non-virtual methods), but the implementation itself is very optimized (there's some good blog articles describing the implementation, but I don't have them at hand), and you always have normal function calls as in C if you need maximum speed (as millstone mentioned). C really feels like a first-class language when using Objective-C, and C is a pretty damn fast language. (As an aside, there was an optional GCed variant of objective-c around for a while. Not sure what the performance impact was vs ref counted.)