Antonio Cangiano has an interesting set of Ruby benchmarks here:

http://antoniocangiano.com/2008/12/09/the-great-ruby-shootout-december-2008/

The two results that were interesting to me were that JRuby does so well, and that REE (“Ruby Enterprise Edition”) was a significant improvement over “plain old Ruby” too. I knew that the JRuby guys have done a lot of work, and done a nice job with their implementation, but didn’t realize just how good it was. REE is a clever idea, but not that much code, and aimed at memory usage, not CPU, so it’s interesting to see how much faster it ends up according to these tests.

A few things that would be interesting to see:

• Raw startup time. Yeah, that probably penalizes JRuby, but it is still a scripting language, and using it like one isn’t possible if it takes forever to start up. How much slower is it?

• A more detailed look at REE’s times. How is it that it’s that much faster because of some memory tweaks?

In any case, it’s a nice bit of work by Antonio – grazie!

Update – old, slow davidw missed the fact that there was a startup time benchmark included. Oops.