Making ActiveRecord 2x faster
It's good to see members of the Rails core team taking performance seriously. I've been on a personal performance quest for the last couple of years, and what I've discovered is that the Rails community as a whole (not necessarily the core developers, but just people producing Rails-related software as a whole) really seems to consider performance to be something of an afterthought. There is a <i>lot</i> of low-hanging fruit laying around that could substantially improve quality of life for the entire Rails ecosystem if people would put a little time into profiling their stuff and eliminating hotspots.<p>It's been very discouraging to me to see responses to performance issues that range from lukewarm to plain "I don't care". The Rails community could benefit a lot from a visible push by the core team to make performance a priority.