David G. Andersen wrote:
>
> If we had a superfast matrix class, it would give (a) along
> with decreasing the runtime by a factor of ten or so.  Sounds
> reasonable.  The same test in matlab would be about 1/4 the lines of
> code and 20x faster if implemented the way it should be.

Great! Then put all C-solutions from the shootout into
an extension and call them from Ruby. This way, Ruby
would have the second place in runtime after C and
the 1st in LOC count.

> 
> The shootout _is_ useful for understanding some general
> aspects of the languages, and for looking for things that
> you might want to really work on speeding up (say, for
> instance, the fact that Ruby's hash accesses seem to be
> about 1/2 the speed of Perl's. ;-)

It is not even clear that this is really the hash-access.
It could be the GC, the loop or who knows what...