Will Ruby ever be *fast*?
performance, ruby
Solution
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.
Problem
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?