Smalltalk may be too slow for realtime digital signal processing (DSP), or video processing/rendering (just to mention two examples). If you are
working on such kind of projects, you probably won't need most of
Smalltalk's high-level features anyway.
In real it does not matter how slow is Smalltalk.
Smalltalk is metalanguage in roots, so use it as the metalanguage (and IDE platform).
Bind it to say LLVM (native JIT or cross-compiler to ARM) and develop a specially-dedicated managed compiler for your concrete task (DSP or distributed data crunching). If LLVM still too slow, write a model translator from some Smalltalk objects set to
Verilog/VHDL.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)