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> MRI Ruby was slow and problematic.

Why problematic?

On the slowness, I would agree that Ruby is slower than many languages, but as an interpreted language this is -up to a certain point- by design, or at least an accepted part of the trade-off one accepts when he takes a programming language. Moreover, Ruby's natural competitor is Python, not -say- Clojure; and I wouldn't that Ruby is significantly slower than Python.

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It had lots of memory leaks. I love Ruby, and I used it anyway, but this bothered me a lot back in the mid-to-late 2000s.

It's gotten a lot better since then, but so have all the other languages! I still love Ruby but I would use Python for ML in a heartbeat.

I work with Ruby, Python, and R daily.

I use Ruby for everything I can, Python for ML, and R for data analysis. I just find it easier to not swim upstream and force ruby onto all of those contexts when the other 2 languages have loads of inertia behind them in those spaces. It's unfortunate.

The ever present memory bloat with Ruby has been discovered to be a glibc issue. Jemalloc makes MRI memory usage much more predictable and stable.

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