from Hacker News

Apple’s A15 chip will ship with an objc_msgSend branch predictor

by cjv on 5/30/21, 6:37 PM with 21 comments

• by kristianp on 5/30/21, 9:50 PM

  Not just branch predictor, but "Software Assisted Branch Prediction". See the source at: https://opensource.apple.com/source/objc4/objc4-824/runtime/...

  Comment near start says:

  /// Code for setting up the H14 ObjC branch prediction control registers.

• by glandium on 5/30/21, 9:26 PM

  "see Apple ISA Extensions to ARMv8: version H14, chapter 23". If only it were available outside Apple...

• by Dutchie2020 on 5/30/21, 9:11 PM

  Can someone please ELI5 this for me? What is the significance of speeding up objc_msgSend for Objective C?

• by miohtama on 5/30/21, 9:00 PM

  Does this actually apply only for Objective C or can other programming languages benefit as well?

• by chmaynard on 5/30/21, 6:57 PM

  This probably means that a significant number of important apps are still coded in Objective-C, which would not be a big surprise. Is the momentum of Swift language adoption slowing down? If so, perhaps Apple is also hedging their bets.