[tedukUsziWos]

It's not because it would not be wise to write a Gran Turismo 7 in an interpreted language such as ruby or python that writing any game with such language wouldn't work. Not all games have such specific requirements as Gran Turismo 7 where huge teams want to extract the most power out of some very specific piece of hardware.

Nowadays it gets easier and easier to use interpreted language as the hardware gets more and more things delegated. For some games, it may be better to do everything in C/C++, some others C/C++ with some interpreted language on top for some parts, and some others whatever language you prefer.

Given higher level language usually help you write code faster, I would definitely give up some performance (which is not really visible usually) in exchange for some efficiency. Even for some 3d game. But then again, not everyone is writing the next Gran Turismo :)

Although I can't speak of ruby or its vm since I never used it, but have used python + OpenGL or pygame quite a few times.

In his case not only performance suffered too much from ruby but writing code in ruby didn't make him more efficient. So ruby didn't bring enough value.

[icebraining]

As an example, Toontown is a full game written in Python, with a C++ game engine (Panda3D) and runs without performance issues at all in a single core 1.6GHz CPU.