I do get that a dynamic language like Ruby will always be slower than a language like Java, which has primitives and where many things, including static method calls, are solved at compile time.
But citing the Alioth.Debian benchmarks? Really?
Dude, take a look at the source-code of those benchmarks sometimes -- they are completely useless ;)
If you want a fast dynamic language, take a look at Lua. It's surprisingly fast, especially LuaJIT, and pretty straight forward (almost boring really). The main downside is that there isn't the breadth of community around it.
it's still slower than ruby 1.9 is it not? I was under the impression the current perf hierarchy was 1.9.2p290 w / gc cleanup patch (ree inspired) > jruby > 1.8.7 (ree) > all the other rubies?
But citing the Alioth.Debian benchmarks? Really?
Dude, take a look at the source-code of those benchmarks sometimes -- they are completely useless ;)