&gt; Maybe the benchmarks you&#x27;re looking at aren&#x27;t gated on method call performance.<p>Most real world programs aren&#x27;t gated on method call performance.<p>And things have changed since the 80ies.  Heck, even in the 90ies, Squeak Smalltalk was plenty fast for media work using a plain byte-code interpreter (no JIT), because the heavy lifting was done in primitives. Just like Tcl was used in supercomputing.