A Comment from "Where Is Smalltalk Weak?"

Firstly, Smalltalk MT had its last release in 2009.  Redline Smalltalk had its last commit (merged) in October 2013.  For practical purposes, they are dead!

Secondly, I shall table two big weaknesses from my personal experience.

1. Lack of a universally-implemented standard

Each Smalltalk implementation is its own silo.  The risk of a vendor providing poor support or (worse) going bust can be devastating.

Over a decade ago, I was on the verge of choosing Smalltalk MT for implementing a new product.  I did not because the initial prototype revealed several integration issues with third-party Windows 32 libraries.

Some Smalltalker from Europe then suggested Dolphin.  Over the following weeks, my team discovered how painful it was to even try `porting' the prototype over to Dolphin Smalltalk.

That killed all prospects of Smalltalk even reaching the upper management for an approval.  My own team no longer wanted to have anything to do with it.  The risk of getting stuck in a silo was very high!

2. Performance

I developed several applications for desktops.  In simple CRUD applications, sure, there is no performance problem.

But, even in mildly complex reports and visualisations, we encountered terrible lags when displaying interactive graphs, etc.  In addition, these lags would manifest more terribly because user input events were never captured reliably by the controllers.

The users were left guessing if their actions were understood by the system, and therefore they had to wait for a few seconds, or if they had to re-try the actions because the system lost the input events.

As the article acknowledges, we - of course - don't even talk about number crunching.

Summary

The above two were my biggest problems back when I used Smalltalk.