When comparing GemStone/S vs VAST Platform (VA Smalltalk), the Slant community recommends GemStone/S for most people. In the question“What are the best Smalltalk implementations?” GemStone/S is ranked 5th while VAST Platform (VA Smalltalk) is ranked 9th. 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 Business support
If you pay for the premium version, you will get great support.
Pro Stable
Pro Backward compatible
You can count with VAST Platform providing backward compatibility or a documented migration guideline in case it is not.
Pro Being actively developed with predictable future
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 Pricy for business
The price is $6,995 for a new license. Updates are cheaper at about $1,995.