As the Topaz guy said, the slowness is due to the abuse of hash table lookups, allocation and copying (HTLAC) https://speakerdeck.com/alex/why-python-ruby-and-j

As the Topaz guy said, the slowness is due to the abuse of hash table lookups, allocation and copying (HTLAC) https://speakerdeck.com/alex/why-python-ruby-and-javascript-are-slow https://speakerdeck.com/alex/why-python-ruby-and-javascript-... And the abuse of HTLAC patterns is due to the lack of non-HTLAC APIs; the syntax is trascurable