If you want to optimize this (and you enjoy pain), you can eliminate the dependency on objc/* headers and use compiler attributes and link sections to compile your code to the same(ish) assembly that Objective-C compiles to. I don't have a C example on hand, but here's a Rust example that's pretty easy to translate to C: https://github.com/objrs/objrs/blob/master/HOW_IT_WORKS.md