Will Ruby ever be *fast*? [closed]

Question

Will Ruby ever see a performance boost as Javascript has seen recently? Can a new VM make it really, really, fast? Or do we have to assume all the benefits of Ruby have an inescapable performance penalty?

What methods could be taken to improve its performance compared to other faster languages?

Answer 1

Jörg W Mittag pointed me in the direction of Rubinius when I asked about Trace Trees finding their way to other scripting languages. Check them out for a faster Ruby.

As an interesting aside, unladen-swallow is trying to speed up Python by using LLVM.

Interesting stuff. There are plenty of unexplored tricks to speed up scripting but I wonder if language developers consider it a priority versus language features and libraries.

Answer 2

Maglev is a ruby implementation that is based upon an existing Smalltalk engine that's been targeting the upper reaches of scaling and usage.

It's designed to be "significantly faster" than existing ruby implementations, you can watch a talk by one of the Maglev Architects if you're interested.

In the same way that different Javascript implementations run faster or slower on different browsers, it's worth noting that ruby itself runs nearly twice as fast on Linux vs Windows.

Answer 3

I think everyone can safely assume it is somewhat slower than other scripting languages

Ruby 1.9 should actually be about the speed of CPython.