I asked about this in another thread that you responded to, and appreciated your answer. (Which had a bunch of links and a strong implication of "well, since yo

I asked about this in another thread that you responded to, and appreciated your answer. (Which had a bunch of links and a strong implication of "well, since you ASKED, here's what you need to go do something about it..." :) ) Given how little code there is in the Ruby/Rails tests there, it doesn't look like a lot of opportunity exists for speeding up the benchmarks by changing that code... but maybe it could be sped up by changing the gems. There are several JSON gems, at least one of which claims to be faster by 2-3x. In the PHP universe there's Phalcon, a C plugin to handle a lot of the work that otherwise would be done in raw PHP. It has good performance versus the other PHP frameworks (not up to the raw PHP numbers). Why hasn't this become the norm? I'm not asking bhauer, folks: why not replace chunks of the code that are slow but have been pretty stable (Rack comes to mind, but other chunks of Rails are probably good contenders) with C plugins/gems? We already commonly use Nginx or another server for static content, why not push that further? Hell, how much similar code could be put to use in other frameworks if the core was done in C/C++ or Java? The focus on the singular language as the only way to do any given framework seems to waste an amazing amount of code, and performance.