As an informal benchmark, the "Language Shootout" would seem to suggest that
Ruby's method dispatch is indeed a good bit faster:

http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/bench/methcall/

Specifically, there's over a 2x difference in the execution time for the specific
test used for that data. In addition, the 'Object Instantiation' test showed an even
more dramatic difference, with Ruby almost 5x faster.

Of course, to be fair, in its more traditional strong areas, (regexp matching, hash
access, etc.) Perl shows an equal or better advantage.

So, not too surprisingly, the performance is likely to depend far more on the
style of code you're writing, algorithms and data structures used, etc., than on
the implementation language, at least among the "usual suspects" (Ruby, Perl,
Python, etc.).

Lennon Day-Reynolds
lennon / day-reynolds.com

On Thu, 27 Feb 2003 12:57:54 +0900
ptkwt / shell1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson) wrote:

> In article <20030227002438.GA3877 / math.umd.edu>,
> Daniel Carrera  <dcarrera / math.umd.edu> wrote:
> >Hello,
> 
> >I was wondering about what exactly makes Perl faster than Ruby, and I made
> >a small test to examine this a bit.  I sort of assumed that it was because 
> >Ruby has more powerful data structures, but it seems that compile-time 
> >optimization might be a significant factor.
> 
> Actually, at the last meeting of the Portland Rubyists we had a new person 
> show up who apparently does a lot of OO Perl and from what he said, for OO 
> programs Ruby is faster because Perl is a lot slower at method dispatch.  
> Anyone else got any data on this?
> 
> Phil
>