As prabhatjha pointed out in another comment in this thread, swizzling was used to automatically capture networking calls just by adding our framework to your app and initializing it. You could then log into our app's web-based dashboard and see stats about networking calls (counts, latency, errors, etc.). This simple and elegant solution would not have been possible with C++. We also supported Android at the time (Java), and the developer was required to change his code to call our networking wrapper calls to get the same tracking for their Android apps.
But the ability to do that comes with certain costs, and performance is one of them. The fact that these "methods" are dynamically dispatched sometimes matters, and you can't change that any more than you can swizzle in C++.
Actually, it would, but not via any feature of the language. You can use features of the linker to accomplish this (particularly LD_PRELOAD). It's not the same thing, really, but it felt worth mentioning for the record.
C++ was born at Bell Labs and quickly integrated into their workflows as C with Classes started to get adopters.
This raised the interest of the C compiler vendors, so by the early 90's, all major C compiler vendors were bundling a C++ compiler with them.
Additionally, Bjarne got convinced that C++ should follow the same path as C and be managed by ISO, so the C++ARM book was written, which is basically the first non-official standard of the language.
So C++ had ISO, the same birthplace as C and love of C compiler vendors, while Objective-C was initial a work from a small company and later on owned by NeXT.
So, naturally Apple, Microsoft, IBM decided to go with C++, and everyone else followed.
Here is an anecdote for Apple fans, Mac OS was written in Object Pascal + Assembly, when market pressure came adopt C and C++, the MPW was born and eventually a C++ framework that mimic the Object Pascal one (there is a longer story here though, ending with PowerPlant framework).
Copland was based on a C++ framework, and Dylan team eventually lost the internal competition to the C++ team regarding the Newton OS.
Apple was one of the major OS vendors that never cared much about C for OS development, only the NeXT acquisition ended changing it. And even then they weren't sure about C and Objective-C, hence the Java Bridge during the first versions.
It's true that MacOS Classic kept providing Pascal headers for most of its APIs for a long time (I don't recall whether they ever stopped), but internally, they started switching to C by the late 1980s (as an external developer, I could tell by one bug which would never have made it through a Pascal compiler, but was typical for the kind of bugs that wouldn't get caught by a K&R C compiler), and by the late 1990, it was all C and C++, just with Pascal calling conventions for all public facing APIs. In my time at Apple, I never encountered a single line of Pascal code.
I never knew anyone doing bare bones C on classic Mac.
What I remember was that with Objective C you needed to track all intermediate values and release them, so you couldn’t write an expression like [[objectA someMessage] anotherMessage] - you had to capture the intermediate in a variable so you could release it at the end.
So this was annoying and I didn’t like Objective C at the time. (25 years later I wrote several iOS apps in it)
C++ let you manage memory and temporary values though constructors and destructors, which was much more appealing, though pre-templates it was quite constrained.
