“Ruby is slow!”
“Slow” isn’t useful
First off, a concession: Yes, Ruby is slower than many languages on many benchmarks. However. “Slow” is a useless descriptor if you don’t have a “fast enough.”
Allow me to strain an analogy. If you’re a driver, I’d bet that whatever car you drive isn’t as fast as what they take on the F1 track. There’s a good chance that you still consider your car fast enough. If you do have a super fast car, you might brag to your friends about how it does zero to sixty in 0.036 seconds, but 99% of the time you’re never going above the posted speed limit.
At some point you start asking more relevant questions like how many cupholders it has.
Did you know…
… that contributors to the Ruby language have made excellent progress on Ruby 3x3, the goal that Ruby 3 should be three times faster than Ruby 2?
… that there are Ruby implementations like JRuby and TruffleRuby built for concurrency and speed?
… that Ruby’s got a snazzy new JIT compiler that’s leading to some pretty nice gains?
… that Ruby 3 introduced Ractors, a handy implementation of the Actor Model for concurrency?