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Ruby Implementation Shootout
An anonymous reader writes "Ruby has an ever growing number of alternative implementations, and many of these attempt to improve the suboptimal performance of the current mainstream interpreter. Antonio Cangiano has an interesting article in which he benchmarks a few of the most popular Ruby implementations, including Yarv (the heart of Ruby 2.0), JRuby, Ruby.NET, Rubinius and Cardinal (Ruby on Parrot). Numerical evidence is provided rather than shear opinions. The tests show that Yarv is the fastest implementation and that it offers a promising future when it comes to the speed of the next Ruby version."
The standard 1.8.X Ruby interpreter is a single-pass interpreter, and YARV is a virtual machine implementation. You can expect big improvements when moving to a VM implementation from an interpeter. The reason Java has never had such big improvements is that it's always been based on a VM.
This rule isn't exactly hard and fast, as verying implementations of VMs and interpreters can have different performance characteristics. For example, while perl is still probably considered an interpreted language, it's quite fast due to the interpreter using many compiler tricks such as parse tree optimizations. The ruby interpreter however has been notoriously slow, which is why ruby people are so excited about it.
Minor note, Ruby on Rails is the web development flavor of the month, not ruby. There are a lot of interesting things happening in plain ole ruby, plus there are other web frameworks than Ruby on Rails, such as Nitro, Camping, etc.
I find it amusing someone would say learn Python because it's used more. Python may be older, but it's still sitting in the programming language high chair right next to Ruby. People say the same thing about Python; "if you want a job learn Java, c#, c++"; and you know what they're right, if you want a job learn Java, period.
I like both Ruby and Python, and I think a programmer would do well to learn one or both. They aren't as popular yet, like Java or c#, but I think they will be. And if you understand the concepts in one, you'll understand the other. Like Gretzky said, "I skate where the puck is going to be, not where it is"; good advice.
I prefer Ruby, but that is just a preference.