[Newbies] Is Squeak/Pharo an appropriate language choice?

[Charles Hixson]

I'm contemplating a project that would benefit greatly by a persistent 
memory image, though I'll eventually (in a year or so) need the 64-bit 
image, but:
The image will be a lot larger than RAM.  It would include a directed 
graph that had an index of a million or so entries, and most nodes 
wouldn't be indexed.  So in order to even load it would need to use some 
sort of lazy access.  And I'm not even sure that a Dictionary of over a 
million items is reasonable.  (Naturally none of the examples address 
this problem.)

Additionally, all of my (written) documentation is so old that it 
doesn't even discuss multi-processor systems, so I don't know whether 
modern Smalltalks make any use of additional available processors.

I'd really like some advice, and possibly some references.  I know that 
Smalltalk has the reputation for being slow (yes, I've been reading 
about the recent speed-ups), but much of what I'd need to write in any 
other language seems like it may already be present in Smalltalk, so if 
it would work, I'd like to choose it.  But I won't be able to test this 
until the application has been running for quite awhile, so I would be 
very desirable that I know ahead of time.

-- 
Charles Hixson