It sounds like they were jumping to conclusions regarding the templating being responsible for creating a large number of objects. ERB, Haml (which is what Dia

It sounds like they were jumping to conclusions regarding the templating being responsible for creating a large number of objects. ERB, Haml (which is what Diaspora uses), and any other templating engine I've seen use either concat or << when rendering a template. These never create a new object, they mutate (and perhaps resize) the original string. Maybe next time they should profile better before following their gut feeling and rewriting their front end ;)