Object, message, and performance: how they coexist in Self

The Self programming language, which distills object-oriented computation down to a simple story based on copying prototypes to create objects, inheriting from objects to share their contents, and passing messages to invoke methods, is discussed. It is shown that Self´s uniform application of the object-message paradigm gives programmers unusual flexibility. Unconventional optimizations can bring its peak performance to within a factor of two of optimized C´s performance. Overviews of Self and its message passing performance are presented.<>