The Great Ruby Shootout

Monday, December 3. 2007

The Great Ruby Shootout

Back in February, I made a very popular post which compared several implementations of the Ruby language. More than 9 months later, I’m back with a brand new shootout. Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be fun.

When I first published a comparison between the various virtual machines and interpreters for Ruby, many of these projects were in their infancy. With the main Ruby interpreter (aka MRI) considered to be fairly slow and with many new implementations that were released in an attempt to address this issue, there was real reason within the community to be genuinely curious about how all these projects measured up. Yarv (incorporated in Ruby 1.9) was the fastest by a long shot, but almost all projects showed a bright and promising future.