Ruby has had a VM competitive with BEAM since Ruby 1.9. BEAM has a slight edge but Ruby also has JRuby with a real JIT and all the GC goodness of the JVM. Mode

Ruby has had a VM competitive with BEAM since Ruby 1.9. BEAM has a slight edge but Ruby also has JRuby with a real JIT and all the GC goodness of the JVM. Modern Python, Ruby, PHP7 are all much faster than generally expected outside of microbenchmarks.