When comparing VisualWorks vs GemStone/S, the Slant community recommends GemStone/S for most people. In the question“What are the best Smalltalk implementations?” GemStone/S is ranked 5th while VisualWorks is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose GemStone/S is:
Gemstone/S is a persistent object environment, capable of high performance database tasks.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
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
Cons
Con Uncertain future
It seems unmaintained, the roadmap is loosely defined and many features have been waiting for years.
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.