When comparing GemStone/S vs Smalltalk/X jv-branch, the Slant community recommends GemStone/S for most people. In the question“What are the best Smalltalk implementations?” GemStone/S is ranked 5th while Smalltalk/X jv-branch is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose GemStone/S is:
Gemstone/S is a persistent object environment, capable of high performance database tasks.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Scalable object-oriented persistence
Gemstone/S is a persistent object environment, capable of high performance database tasks.
Pro Free version even for commercial use
GemStone/S has very capable licenses for no cost that allow businesses to use it commercially for no cost.
Pro Extreme robustness, performance and flexibility
This product has a long line of evolution, guaranteeing all these qualities
Pro Smalltalk
Smalltalk is one of the most productive environments, which makes the hard things easy and the difficult, practical.
Pro Tightly related to Pharo Smalltalk
You can develop your Smalltalk projects on friendly Pharo and run them on the rock solid GemStone environment.
Pro Live debugging production errors
Never debug from textual traces anymore: do live debugging of saved stack traces for production errors
Pro Many libraries included with the environment
Pro Mercurial support
Supports modern versioning control system - Mercurial. Directly from the GUI environment.
Pro Build with rake scripts
Transparent way to build whole environment. It is simple to build it from scratch.
Pro Bugs you can find, can be also fixed by you or you can just report them
If you find bug you can create a patch and send it to the https://swing.fit.cvut.cz/projects/stx-jv/report/9
Pro Fast
Since the core is written in C (in future maybe some part will be in C++) it is really fast.
Pro Very easy to create a prototype
Contains a GUI window builder which makes it easy for prototype creation.
Pro You can download binaries if you do not want to build the env yourself
Pro Support Smalltalk images
This allows you to store the whole environment in the state you finished and it can be loaded in a state where you want to continue.
Pro VM contains a java 1.7 support.
VM contains a java 1.7 support. Which means if you have java 1.7 jdk like (zulu 1.7) you can use java libraries within the Smalltalk/X environment.
Cons
Con Vendor lock-in
The environment is unique and you easily become very dependent on what it has to offer, while there is no alternative vendor to switch to.
Con The runtime environment is essentially free, but not open source.
Con On windows uses ancient Borland make files
This will dependency will be removed in the future, but currently is there.