[bo-tato]

If you're just using it for quick scripting, which is where startup time mostly matters, and you only use the stdlib and no external gems, you can use --disable-gems and it starts in half the time as python for me.

[cutler]

Hey, you're right. Down from 100ms to 30ms which is 10ms faster than Python. So it's game over for Python, not Ruby, after all ;-)