On a related note, I recently ported a Python script to Ruby and found that the Ruby 1.9.0 interpreter ran the script about 20 times faster than the 1.8.6 interpreter (though it was still about 10% slower when compared to Python).

Matz and the Ruby team are doing good work on Ruby. Too bad Rails doesn't run on 1.9.0 yet (something about waiting for changes to Mongrel).