> I don’t where these myths get started, but someone needs to justify the Ruby-is-slow thing with actual data. As an outside observer of the Ruby world, I have

> I don’t where these myths get started, but someone needs to justify the Ruby-is-slow thing with actual data. As an outside observer of the Ruby world, I have an impression that it was Ruby MRI that was slow. CPU-bound synthetic benchmarks like the much-criticized Benchmarks Game showed Ruby ≤ 1.8 a good deal slower than CPython 2. Here is an illustrative comment from that time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253310. People also complained about early Rails, and the perception of Ruby's performance got mixed up with that of Rails. Then YARV came out, and Ruby became several times faster than its MRI former self on different benchmarks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YARV#Performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YARV#Performance). With YARV, Ruby gradually caught up to "fast" interpreted languages. Now interpreted Ruby seems as fast as CPython 3 or faster in synthetic benchmarks (for example, https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks/blob/7bf440499e2b1e81fb76c9a4e164dc77cbe90841/README.md#benchb https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks/blob/7bf440499e2b1e81fb...), though still behind the fastest mainstream interpreters like Lua's. Ruby is even faster with YJIT.