http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/
These benchmarks show that Ruby 1.9 (MRI) is much faster than 1.8. In
fact, it is even faster than Python (the closest competing* language).
But keep in mind that dynamically-typed, everything-is-an-object
languages will always come with performance penalties.
*Not that we're actually "competing"--we're all friends, helping
eachother make great very-high-level languages with our respective
preferred syntaxes and feature-sets. But Ruby is still way better. 
ยทยทยท
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