People unfamiliar with history live in a fantasy world. Smalltalk or more specifically one of it's dialects, Self (an even more "extreme" Smalltalk), made huge

People unfamiliar with history live in a fantasy world. Smalltalk or more specifically one of it's dialects, Self (an even more "extreme" Smalltalk), made huge advances in JIT compilation. Advances which later ended up in the Java HotSpot virtual machine. Some benchmarks hit half the performance of optimized C. That was in the late 90s.