Yes, the VM should abort the primitive with a failure, it's a VM flaw and I posted to vm-dev already. 2013/12/17 Matias Garcia Isaia <mgarciaisaia@gmail.com>
As stated in http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20621119/how-to-print-an-integer-to-trans..., SmallInteger inherits it's new: message from Behaviour, so if one expects SmaillInteger new: 0 to give you a 0, it really crashes the VM while trying to Inspect the result.
Running it with an argument different than 0 (SmallInteger new: 10) raises an error ("SmallInteger cannot have variable sized instances").
I think it would be really nice to have it just return the parameter, but that's opinology - you decide how to solve it. The thing I think is not subjective is that the VM crashes - that shouldn't happen.
Tested in #30649