This whole, "Ruby is slow," diatribe is just ridic.
Everyone here that has done any C/C++ or Ruby development would probably agree that if you're looking for number smashing, Ruby is just not cutting it unless you're into rockin' C extensions and getting what you want... for now.
Ruby, within a few years, will probably have some VM action, whether the JVM with JRuby or Rubinius wins out, who cares.
In any case, in like 5 or 6 years when we all have 50/100 core machines, Ruby's gonna be just fine for almost everything. Maybe by then we will be done arguing and just agree that Ruby is the nicest language to look at and develop in, even if it has subpar performance. Because if you're arguing something different, you've probably never gone from Ruby to C or Java or even Python... just so you all know, it blows.
Tim Sweeney predicted that we'd all have 20 core machines with 80 hardware threads by 2009. Not really what happened.
The whole point is that while Ruby is nice, it's just too slow. Someone is better off investing time learning a faster compiled/JIT language.
Too slow for what? Certainly not all classes of problems. Heavy mathematical work (every number in Ruby is an object! That's going to be much, much slower than a C primitive!), sure, but there are lots of folks using it quite happily to solve a wide range of problems.
Everyone here that has done any C/C++ or Ruby development would probably agree that if you're looking for number smashing, Ruby is just not cutting it unless you're into rockin' C extensions and getting what you want... for now.
Ruby, within a few years, will probably have some VM action, whether the JVM with JRuby or Rubinius wins out, who cares.
In any case, in like 5 or 6 years when we all have 50/100 core machines, Ruby's gonna be just fine for almost everything. Maybe by then we will be done arguing and just agree that Ruby is the nicest language to look at and develop in, even if it has subpar performance. Because if you're arguing something different, you've probably never gone from Ruby to C or Java or even Python... just so you all know, it blows.