I hear you. The last time I used squeak as a prototyping tool was around 2002 and yeah, the performance was pretty craptastic. I bumped into David Ungar at a conference a few years back. He mentioned there has been a fair amount of work back-ported to Squeak from some of the later Self work and maybe even from Lively Kernel for all I know.
But lest someone read this thread and use it as evidence that Squeak is completely crappy, I would encourage them to do a bit of testing with a recent version. Also... I don't think people are going to use Smalltalk for it's raw performance, but in it's ability to model problems with pleasant "pure" OOP-ness.
There have been very extensive changes since 2002, yep, such as a much improved interpreter, a JIT, a replacement of the original object memory format which incidentally supports faster become and most recently a new bytecode set.
But lest someone read this thread and use it as evidence that Squeak is completely crappy, I would encourage them to do a bit of testing with a recent version. Also... I don't think people are going to use Smalltalk for it's raw performance, but in it's ability to model problems with pleasant "pure" OOP-ness.