I wrote the benchmark, and have never developed on a Mac or with the Cocoa framework. I started with a C application because I was familiar with the MySQL C ap

I wrote the benchmark, and have never developed on a Mac or with the Cocoa framework. I started with a C application because I was familiar with the MySQL C api (specifically, their prepared statements), and that was very fast. Adding threading in C is difficult, so I took the opportunity to learn how to use NSThread, and really liked it. The benchmark is mostly C for the nitty gritty details, with some Objective-C to tie everything together. I wouldn't say I'm extremely comfortable with it, but it's very easy to drop straight down to C for the interesting bits.