This would make sense for web apps. For (presumably) many people, ruby still is mostly a sysadmin scripting language. In that case, shorter startup times are of

This would make sense for web apps. For (presumably) many people, ruby still is mostly a sysadmin scripting language. In that case, shorter startup times are often more important than runtime performance. I personally love ruby but I wouldn't want to use it (or any dynamically typed language) for anything bigger.