What are the main advantages and disadvantages of the Message Dispatch method?

The Message Dispatch method in iOS is a message-sending mechanism to objects that underpins the Objective-C runtime.

Advantages:

• Flexibility: allows dynamic method invocation, facilitating patterns like delegates and notifications.
• Dynamic Typing: objects can handle messages even if their types are unknown at compile time.
• Extensibility: behavior of calls can be intercepted and modified through method swizzling.

Disadvantages:

• Performance: calling via Message Dispatch is slower than direct method calls because it requires runtime lookup.
• Lack of compile-time checking: errors in method names are only detected at runtime.
• Debugging complexity: the dynamic nature complicates call tracing and error detection.