This LiveJournal post explains again why benchmarks aren't always what they are cracked up to be. This guy looked at the Programming Languages Shootout site, and concluded that Smalltalk was very slow:

But not impossible. For example, compare C (as compiled with gcc) vs. Smalltalk GST (gnu Smalltalk). On the binary tree test, C is 28 times faster and uses 47 times less memory.

Hmm. VW Smalltalk (or any other modern implementation) while still slower, would have been much closer. Why? GST is interpreted, and in memory terms, uses a primitive GC. So what we have is an apples vs. oranges comparison. Clicking over to the VW comparison, it's about what I'd expect: 2.4 times slower. For that matter, GST was 10 times slower (not 28 - at least for the Gentoo side tests I looked at).

You should also note this disclaimer about code size, from the site:

Code Lines is even more misleading for Smalltalk than for other languages - we show Smalltalk source code in a verbose chunk file format used to archive or transfer source code between Smalltalk images.

Yep - no one ever reads Smalltalk in chunk format...