I've been hacking on a little scripting language[1] lately. To see how its performance compares, I run a few benchmarks[2] against other similar (dynamically typed, bytecode compiled) languages: Lua, LuaJIT (interpreted), Python, and Ruby.
Like others, I had internalized "Ruby is slow" through osmosis. But the version of Ruby I happen to have on my machine is 2.0.0.
In my little benchmarks, it turns out Ruby is one of the fastest. I haven't compared to 1.8.7, but I'm guessing that was much slower.
[1] https://github.com/munificent/wren [2] https://github.com/munificent/wren/tree/master/benchmark
If you want the gory details, here's the results of running them against Lua 5.3.2, LuaJIT 2.0.2, Python 2.7.5, and Ruby. (Yes, I should try against Python 3. I will.):
score time wren score relative
binary_trees - wren 3193 0.31s
binary_trees - lua 1366 0.73s 233.72%
binary_trees - luajit 6256 0.16s 51.04%
binary_trees - python 1376 0.73s 231.96%
binary_trees - ruby 3003 0.33s 106.34%
fib - wren 3078 0.32s
fib - lua 2785 0.36s 110.52%
fib - luajit 6900 0.14s 44.62%
fib - python 1331 0.75s 231.37%
fib - ruby 3548 0.28s 86.77%
for - wren 6080 0.16s
for - lua 1990 0.08s 50.71%
for - luajit 5914 0.02s 13.24%
for - python 2825 0.35s 215.25%
for - ruby 6595 0.15s 92.19%
method_call - wren 4707 0.21s
method_call - lua 1674 0.60s 281.17%
method_call - luajit 4221 0.24s 111.53%
method_call - python 767 1.30s 613.69%
method_call - ruby 3061 0.33s 153.77%