In a series of ongoing rewrites of Haiku's BMessage() code, Michael Lotz has posted a benchmark of BMessage() performance in a number of circumstances, with R5, Haiku's original, his first and his second rewrite being compared. An overall winner and a Haiku winner is given in each case.

While the tests may not make much sense to a non-developer, BMessage() operations are extremely important and very commonly used for messaging within BeOS. Nearly every action from clicking a button upwards uses BMessage's to communicate with the application or the system.

Some of the largest speed improvements cover BMessage unflattening. This is probably most noticably used to read back application settings in nearly every native BeOS application, and faster unflattening will improve startup time significantly.

For those of you who used BeOS in Be's days, you may remember the weekly BMessage, which replaced the Be Newsletter in its later years. Unfortunately, despite Haiku's BMessage getting faster, the newsletters aren't guaranteed to get faster too :)