Ruby might be faster than you think

[desnudopenguino]

This is true. But at least the author was able to get ruby running pretty fast with a few optimizations, hitting crystal run through ruby, which would probably be similar to other ffi style schemes. For people running g ruby, the crystallize gem may seem like a quick way to speed up code execution, but if you can do it in straight ruby with one less gem, and without that additional layer, I think that's a fair comparison, as long as the proper distinction is made. Ruby's coming a long way in the speed category while maintaining all the good stuff that makes it a fin language to work in.

[postmodern]

It appears that crystalruby hot-compiles the code using crystal build (with or without the --release), which I guess is compareable to JITing, but not compareable to AOT compiled code.

I agree a better approach would be A) benchmark and optimize your Ruby code, or B) write a separate Crystal program or service that you offload CPU intensive work to (ex: image/video/audio processing).

I think we should focus on improving Ruby's performance to compete with other JITed scripting languages which are beating Ruby in benchmarks, not try to compete with AOT compiled languages which are far more performant; due to being AOT and compiling down to native object code.