> you are suggesting that it'd be the other way around, and I don't see why that'd be the case.

That's just what I observed, and I concluded from the observations that Smalltalk - like Python - must be more difficult to JIT compile than Self or JS for some reason. I asked Stefan Marr for his most recent measurement results, and he was so friendly to post some reports: https://github.com/smarr/are-we-fast-yet/issues/85. As it seems the Graal/Truffle based implementation of SOM (a Smalltalk dialect) is now as fast as Node.js (V8), at least the AST version on the Graal enterprise edition; the Graal community editions of the SOM VMs are still slower though (about the same performance as Cog/OpenSmalltalk by estimate).