VIvidarh·Sep 16, 2013
First of all "Ruby" is not an implementation. The performance differences between MRI and the different patched versions of it, MacRuby, MagLev, jRuby, Rubinius etc. can be substantial.
[edit: I referenced https://github.com/cogitator/ruby-implementations/wiki/List-... here, but then I read through the rest of the list, and too much of it is "junk", so I added the list of the more mature implementations above instead]
But the point is not that making speed improvements is impossible. I strongly believe Ruby can be made as fast as current JS implementation or better.
But there's a vast gap between being able to, and for performance numbers based on 45% of RubySpec to mean anything about what we can expect to see in terms of performance of this particular implementation.
I'm working on a Ruby compiler myself (woefully incomplete; certainly
Read the rest
vastly faster than MRI on the tiny subset it can compile, but pointless to benchmark for exactly the reasons I stated: I have no way of telling how much performance it'll lose to deal with method invalidation etc.), and I absolutely love that more people try to implement Ruby and it'd be fantastic if these performance gains stay as they flesh it out.
As someone else pointed out: Several Ruby implementation started out with impressive numbers on some subset of the language. Then they slowed down more and more as code was added to handle the corner cases of the language.
Maybe these guys will do better. Maybe they won't. The current benchmark does not tell us either way.