"Smalltalk has never had decent performance as far as I know - not even with a JIT backend. Not compared to Java/C# with JIT compilation at least." This is lar

"Smalltalk has never had decent performance as far as I know - not even with a JIT backend. Not compared to Java/C# with JIT compilation at least." This is largely because the team that did a JIT enabled Smalltalk dropped it and started to work on a JIT enabled VM for Java. This team got bought by Sun in the 90's and their Java VM was HotSpot, which is used in Java today. As somebody else notes, a lot of the optimizations used in JVM come from dynamic languages such as Smalltalk and Self...