[yxhuvud]

Say what? Ruby has been faster than Python for interpreted code for years now.

Granted, Python is faster for tasks like those Numpy solves, but in arbitrary execution performance, python is just slower. 8x has NEVER been true. That must have been you doing some really bad stuff in one of them but not both.

[blunte]

I stand corrected. I used Ruby for 6 years, up to 2015. I wasn't using Python during those years, but I thought I had heard or read about the 8x speed difference in favor of Python.

For sure, Ruby was slow for what we were doing... processing millions of rows of data was so slow that it caused me to decide to try Go (and the same Go program was hundreds of times faster). But I didn't try Python then.

[jashmatthews]

I think there was a short period about 11 years ago before the release of Ruby 1.9 where the Python VM was basically re-written to be as fast as YARV, but YARV wasn't released yet.