In it's heyday smalltalk VM performance was far behind C,asm,etc. As a result it never gained much traction. Once it became practical to run/use VMs the smallta

In it's heyday smalltalk VM performance was far behind C,asm,etc. As a result it never gained much traction. Once it became practical to run/use VMs the smalltalk legacy had been tainted by C/C++ and thus java.