I believe the Squeak/Pharo VMs are much faster than the Python and Ruby interpreters. There are other tricks - an Int maybe be an object, but a special one that

I believe the Squeak/Pharo VMs are much faster than the Python and Ruby interpreters. There are other tricks - an Int maybe be an object, but a special one that fits in a register. The part that other languages don’t get is it’s the Smalltalk environment that makes it special, and there is just nothing like it in our modern tooling.