I think it never had Eiffel's level of tooling, and libraries, focused on UNIX platforms as CLI compiler, hence why it never took off outside its research university.

I learned about it on a Dr. Dobbs article and that was about it.

As for performance, Eiffel was already quite fast, because while it used a VM for development (MELT), AOT compilation was done via system compilers, with support for generics and value types from the beginning.

It was also one of the first OOP languages to support non-nullable references.

EDIT: This was the Sather article I referred to. https://www.drdobbs.com/tools/the-sather-programming-languag...