I’ve come to see the worries about “speed” in Ruby as a bad meme that the Ruby community is kind of insecure about, but needs to shrug off. The language gets a

I’ve come to see the worries about “speed” in Ruby as a bad meme that the Ruby community is kind of insecure about, but needs to shrug off. The language gets a little faster with each release, and as the author points out, the cumulative improvement over the last ten years is excellent. Meanwhile, Ruby performance is right in line with Python[1], and in general people are not ragging on Python for its slowness. If the Ruby world wants to keep growing and thriving what I think matters more is the ecosystem. These days Ruby is very mature, battle-tested, and has a rich ecosystem for web application development. But this meme that Ruby is “too slow” has taken some of the air out of the balloon, as well as just becoming “boring old tech,” and combined there is definitely less active / fast-moving development work in Ruby libraries compared to ten years ago. IMO the biggest problem with Ruby has always been the double-edged sword of Rails. Rails is the only thing that really made Ruby go mainstream, and if the language is going to really bloom it needs to expand beyond that. Ruby is a great high-level general purpose language, and it could be a good fit in all kinds of applications, but until one of those takes off we’re just going to keep reliving this meme of Ruby being too slow which came about around the peak of Rails popularity (circa Ruby 1.8.7 to 1.9.3) when it had much more truth to it than it does now. [1]: I develop a lot of small applications in both Ruby and Python, and for curiosity’s sake often convert one to the other language and benchmark. There’s no perfect way to compare languages, but that’s a reasonably good one.