The average overhead of a message send using the runtime Apple ships these days is insanely low; it’s on the order of approximately two nanoseconds a call. With some minor insight you can bring that down to well under a nanosecond, literally single-digit clock cycles, just by testing if indirection is necessary. (For reference, this is about on par with, or on days I’m feeling a bit confident even better than, a C++ virtual method call.) There is no way that Objective-C is hundreds of times slower than C++ unless there is something else going on.

Agreed. See my edit.