The O'Reilly blog has two great interviews posted from the last week  
or so. The first [1] is with Zed Shaw, the author of Mongrel (and a  
bunch of other Ruby frameworks and utilities). A follow-up interview  
with one of the contributors on the Mongrel project, Luis Lavena [2],  
covered some similar ground.

What I found most striking about both interviews was their mention of  
YARV and Ruby's poor computational performance. Zed said, and I quote:

> IÃÍl be honest right away though and say that Ruby is slow. The  
> Ruby community has been ignoring the huge ÅÑerformanceelephant  
> standing in the room and they need to start talking about it so it  
> goes away. Elephants hate being talked about. There are a few  
> efforts to make Ruby faster, but I see a lot less action than is  
> needed to solve the problem. One solution in the works is a real  
> virtual machine called Rite (or YARV depending on who you talk to)  
> which is showing some real promise and seems to be speed  
> competitive with the fastest Java implementations.

I tend to agree with this. Whenever the subject of computational  
performance comes up, quite a few posts end up in the thread  
questioning the meaning of the word performance and turn it into an  
argument over semantics. Is it coding speed, clarity of thought,  
readability, etc. To me that kind of crazy semantic dodge doesn't  
serve us well. Those discussions should be remain on computational  
performance since the language has been (mostly) stable in syntax for  
years.

So what is being done to get YARV the attention it deserves? Why  
aren't we talking about it all the time? What can I personally do to  
help? Are there valid excuses for not focusing on improving Ruby's  
poor computational performance?

cr

[1] http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2006/05/post.html
[2] http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2006/05/ 
interview_with_luis_lavena_2.html