The hype build-up continues. Note how a friend of MagLev devs points out that it's "up to 60x", which technically could mean anything including "60x for one specific case and 1x for the rest of them". With claims that are this wishy-washy, the only sensible option is to wait for the benchmarks of the public release. Anything else merely fuels the hype machine.
(edit) Hmm, interesting .. getting down-modded. I guess independent benchmarking is no longer a preferred way of confirming rather bold vendor claims.
You should be skeptical of vendor benchmarks. But being ignorant of how far VM technologies have come and how far Ruby has left to go is not excusable. (Or more importantly, not being self-aware enough to figure out what you don't know, then having the bad luck to get posted on social news.)
In any case, most of the time it matters more to programmer's egos now than anything else. CPython is already fast enough for low-level bitwise operations on large amounts of data, provided you are clever with optimizing and you're willing to implement key routines in C. Just look at Mercurial! It's in the same league as Git for speed, and Git is written entirely in C by one of the best C hackers around.
Note how a friend of MagLev devs points out that it's "up to 60x", which technically could mean anything including "60x for one specific case and 1x for the rest of them"
No; you're intentionally distorting things. "Up to 60x" is a quote from Sho's piece, and I just pointed out that he uses this claim inconsistently.
Later in the piece, I note that I don't know if MagLev will be even 10x faster when released.
Collison only mentions 'up to 60x' in a parenthetical about Fukamachi's distortions. To note that tiny bit, as if it's a 'wishy-washy' hyped claim (as opposed to just a clarification of the original presentation) is equally distorting.
Also, the point of Fukamachi's critics is that the MagLev claims aren't "rather bold" at all, given the well-established performance of other Ruby-like language environments. Some doubt is healthy. Vigorously doubting things well-known to the dynamic languages community is sophomoric.
(edit) Hmm, interesting .. getting down-modded. I guess independent benchmarking is no longer a preferred way of confirming rather bold vendor claims.