Going through an @objc protocol for bridging Cocoa strings to Swift
String was working, but it had several disadvantages, including the cost
of invoking objc_msgsend and the need to viciously cast away type-safety
to get past swift's ObjC bridging restrictions.
Instead, Swift's core stdlib now contains a couple of "function
pointers" (variables of Optional<some-Swift-function-type>) that are set
when Foundation is loaded. We use C++ dynamic initialization to set up
these variables, which is probably not the right long-term answer, but
works for now.
These functions, instead of invoking objc methods on NSString, go
through CFStringXXX functions, which have a fast path that avoids
objc_msgsend in Cocoa's common cases, and since they're not @objc
methods, they can use Swift's full type vocabulary.
It would still be nice to avoid any dynamic dispatch and checking
overheads for going through these optional function variables, but this
ought to be a lot better than where we were, and it keeps Foundation
decoupled from the core standard library.
Along the way, a fair amount of needless code bulk was shed. Shedding
FTW!
Swift SVN r12327
