[davidcuddeback]

Not necessarily. It can take a long time to load a large project, including any Rails applications. A typical Rails application can take about 30 seconds to load (that's any time you run a Rake task, launch a server, run unit tests, etc) and unit test runs can typically take a few minutes, often times more than 10 minutes for large applications. If you use a test server, such as Spork, the load time largely goes away for running your tests, but there's still a few seconds of startup time. Just because a language doesn't have an explicit "compile" step doesn't mean its void of compiling-related problems.

[getsat]

> A typical Rails application can take about 30 seconds to load

Typical? Wtf kind of codebases have you been working on?

The largest Rails app I've worked on had 250 models and 200 controllers. It took 12 seconds to load the Rails environment on Ruby 1.8.

Rails 3.1+ on 1.9.3 is pretty darn fast, even for medium-sized apps (50+ models).