yes, basically. i don't like paying the cost at runtime for a lot of things... NSArray is very useful for instance, but I can't use it for any serious amount of data I want to process in a frame. this comes down to the design of the language implementation not caring about performance. its not so much a tradeoff as 'for performance reasons I can not use Objective-C'

i also don't like the ref counting. when given a choice i would rather do my own allocations.