Lua itself is much faster then Python or Ruby. Both languages look, as if the author did read 'A little Smalltalk' by Timothy Budd, though that its easy to desi

Lua itself is much faster then Python or Ruby. Both languages look, as if the author did read 'A little Smalltalk' by Timothy Budd, though that its easy to design a new language, and repeated all errors(simplifications) out of the book. I dont know the main problem of Ruby, but I would point to the garbage collector for Python, as a ref counting GC is required for finalization, and ref counting is slow as hell. Python after 2.0 therefore required two slow GCs. The old ref counting GC, that slows down every object access, and in addition a simple stop the world GC to clean up cyclic references.