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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

The references to Ruby aren't entirely what they seem in here. They seem to be relating to Ruby on the older shootouts, rather than the recent ones. That is, the uber-slow Ruby 1.8, rather than the Perl-beating and PHP-matching Ruby 1.9 which is more closely related to "yarv" on this list.

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rather than the Perl-beating and PHP-matching Ruby 1.9

Maybe I just can't read, but Ruby 1.9 appears to still be slower than Perl on more than half of the tests. I wouldn't call that "Perl-beating".

Its great to see Ruby so much faster with 1.9 because 1.8 speed was such a stumbling block in data intensive stuff that I pushed towards it.

However don't count your chickens just yet with regards to Ruby 1.9 being "Perl-beating" ;-) Don't you think its odd that Perl 5.10.0 sits only just above Ruby 1.8.7 in the current alioth shootout? Quick look at the tests and I can see a problem with a known 5.10.0 speed issue bug. Fixing this in a quick local test here makes all the difference ;-)

> Fixing this in a quick local test here makes all the difference ;-)

It makes all the difference to that one benchmark - not to the overall situation.

> Perl-beating and PHP-matching

Which is interesting considering Perl beats PHP on both axis in the linked article.

Maybe that's because Ruby 1.9 isn't being used in production yet. I tried using it but many gems are still incompatible with it.

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