Yes, but take a look at the memory usage benchmarks (on the cited benchmarks) and Ruby is similar to Java's JVM on memory usage, sometimes better, sometimes wor

Yes, but take a look at the memory usage benchmarks (on the cited benchmarks) and Ruby is similar to Java's JVM on memory usage, sometimes better, sometimes worse. You would need to compare "toy program" by "toy program", but for example, for the regex-redux program: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/regexredux.html http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/regexredux.html Bottom line is... MRI runtime is as memory hungry as a Java JVM runtime.