JRuby is growing stronger and so is Rubinius. As those implementations grow and mature, they'll get faster because they offer solutions in terms of runtime that

JRuby is growing stronger and so is Rubinius. As those implementations grow and mature, they'll get faster because they offer solutions in terms of runtime that piggyback on technologies that are getting better and faster at optimizing the bytecode produced (JVM, LLVM in that case). I do think Ruby will get faster eventually. Maybe not to the point that Ruby suddenly becomes "fast" of course, but by a margin that can make a difference. This is only my opinion (backed by some benchmarks in -for now- particular circumstances) of course, but I'm hopeful that the situation will improve.