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Comment by jtchang | Hacker News Reader

I had a whole semester worth of Squeak at Georgia Tech. Can't really remember much at this point except that everything was an object and the environment we worked in was super slow.

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Smalltalk has always been decades ahead of its time and it being slow on, say, the Alto or the Star, was kind of expected. That said, Squeak is very nimble compared to pretty much anything else currently in use. I’ll assume your memory is from the late 90’s and the computers were not particularly fast.

Squeak's virtual machine was an interpreted one until the company Qwaq hired Eliot Miranda in 2008 or so to develop a JIT compiler virtual machine. His "Cog" VM is what is used for Squeak, Pharo, Cuis and NewSpeak on x86, x86-64 and various versions of ARM. This, combined with faster hardware, makes for a much nicer experience than in 2002, for example.

Of course, some of the extra performance is lost when new layers of code get added, specially in the graphical user interface.

Im not sure performance was ever the problem for Smalltalk after GUIs became mainstream. At first, it was license cost and, after free (as both speech and beer) versions became available, the main issue was the alien feel at a time apps were following desktop UI guidelines closely and the “doesn’t play well with others” feature.

The UI conformity requirement has loosened up a lot with the web and web apps, but I guess that the time is still not right.

It is objectively slow, but not slower than full featured IDEs like Visual Studio or IntelliJ, which offer a much more constrained environment and toolset.

Python is also “slow” and we still use it.

BTW, it’s nice to talk yo you again, Jecel.

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