gabriele renzi said:
>
> If you really feel ruby (or python) is slow you can act later optimizing
> it, not doing it before you ever need to be faster. "premature
> optimization is the root of all evil", people say.

I heartily agree with this, and it doesn't just apply to Ruby and Python,
but every language. I used to find myself wasting a lot of time trying to
come up with some clever "fast" solution, when the reality is in almost
every conceivable case the "dumb" solution does the job very fast on
modern machines.

But Python does seem to be faster in most cases, and this is because the
Python interpreter uses bytecode while the current Ruby interpreter just
interprets the AST tree after parsing. But there is currently a lot of
impressive work going into a Ruby bytecode interpreter, called YARV:
http://www.atdot.net/yarv/

You can expect the Ruby interpreter that uses YARV to be 3 or 4 times
faster (I've compiled it and ran the benchmarks.)

Ryan