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I've known how powerful perform: is for a long time. One of the things that makes it such a joy to use in Smalltalk vs other languages with similiar knock-off facilities, is how relatively terse, straightforward, and simple the Smaltalk approach is. That aside, I guess I always thought it was one of those powerful features that benefited the system greatly, but was not actually referred to in that many places. Maybe a couple of high traffic spots, but certainly not a large number of call sites making use of it.

I needed to find references to perform: and friends in one of my applications the other day so I could isolate and abstract it. In doing so I got curious as to just how many senders of perform: and friends there are. I used this code snippet to find the answer:

mc := MethodCollector new.
((mc referencesTo: #perform:) | (mc referencesTo: #perform:with:) 
	| (mc referencesTo: #perform:with:with:) 
		| (mc referencesTo: #perform:with:with:with:) 
		| (mc referencesTo: #perform:withArguments:)) select

In an image with Store and and the RB and my standard tools, but none of the applications I've been working on, I get 471.

What would you have guessed? I was actually surprised at how many there are and would not have guessed that many. Albeit, said image has ~57000 methods in it, so this is still just under 1%. It would be interesting to know how widespread the use of the same Java facilities is in an IDE like Eclipse.