Paul Brannan wrote:
> As interesting as this is, I don't think that for real-world
> applications, any of it is relevant.  Most Ruby and Perl programmers
> will rewrite a portion of code as a C extension when it is not fast
> enough.  Given this approach, Ruby and Perl will probably perform
> similarly for most applications.

Ruby's advantage here is that the C interface is very nice. From what 
I've heard, it's much more seamless than Perl's C interface (which I 
admit to not having used).

I use Ruby for performance-intensive numerical simulations. Because 
Ruby's so good at quick and dirty string processing (like Perl) as well 
as complex data structures (unlike Perl), it's a reasonable task to 
generate C code on the fly to implement user-defined simulation 
specifications. I'm getting performance comparable with the C 
application that was originally used to do this work, plus advantages of 
being able to control, inspect, etc. the simulation from Ruby code.