This just in: Ruby actually fast now

Apple's version of Ruby could already, at this early stage of its development, be about three times as fast as the fastest Ruby implementation available elsewhere.^[1]

But that's still slow as fuck, right?
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_{[1] - http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/29/207240}

>>12
It started out as a hobby language for writing shell scripts. The author didn't care much about speed, so even though he wrote it in C, it wasn't designed with fast execution in mind, and so it was merely "good enough." He added features for years with no regard to how much work it would take to reimplement everything.

Then the killer apps like Rails came along, and used all those features he'd been adding, so even when people started implementing fast versions of Ruby, there were so many weird edge cases that none of the apps worked right. So, it's taking forever to get a fast, stable, production-ready Ruby out the door.

If the core of the language had been smaller, tighter, and more consistent, it would have been trivial to drop in a replacement interpreter with a faster design.