To paint broad strokes, I think it's more accurate to say that the Ruby maintainers have generally prioritized user experience (where the user here is the programmer) over performance. I think the Python maintainers have maybe prioritized performance a bit higher than their Ruby counterparts, but there's definitely still a higher emphasis on ease of use. Given the goals of both languages and the need to make pragmatic choices, I think their priorities are well set. That said, I think a Java-fast Python or Ruby is an incredibly laudable goal, and I'm happy every time I see people working on it.
To use some other broad strokes.. Are there actually any large performance sensitive ruby projects? Python has quite a following in scientific computing and there are some people trying to do some large performance matters projects in python.
I can also tell you that the idea of simply using c for the slow parts is good but it's not too difficult to build a largish project in a dynamic language where that's very difficult. A high speed kernel with slow control plane can still be slow.
Pyston seems like it has some interesting goals and it might achieve them. There are some substantial ones they haven't addressed yet, cough Gil cough. If they are good, it'll just be a faster python, whereas pypy is very good and if the community embraces what they are doing, it's a new kid of thing.
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To paint broad strokes, I think it's more accurate to say that the Ruby maintainers have generally prioritized user experience (where the user here is the programmer) over performance. I think the Python maintainers have maybe prioritized performance a bit higher than their Ruby counterparts, but there's definitely still a higher emphasis on ease of use. Given the goals of both languages and the need to make pragmatic choices, I think their priorities are well set. That said, I think a Java-fast Python or Ruby is an incredibly laudable goal, and I'm happy every time I see people working on it.
To use some other broad strokes.. Are there actually any large performance sensitive ruby projects? Python has quite a following in scientific computing and there are some people trying to do some large performance matters projects in python.
I can also tell you that the idea of simply using c for the slow parts is good but it's not too difficult to build a largish project in a dynamic language where that's very difficult. A high speed kernel with slow control plane can still be slow.
Pyston seems like it has some interesting goals and it might achieve them. There are some substantial ones they haven't addressed yet, cough Gil cough. If they are good, it'll just be a faster python, whereas pypy is very good and if the community embraces what they are doing, it's a new kid of thing.