Ruby is slow, but enough for <i>many</i> things. 
Rails is slow, dog slow. And no one in Rails team care much.<p>While it is slightly unfair, most within the Ruby on Rails Community do not care about speed at all.<p>PHP has Facebook, Java has Sun and other Enterprise, JS has Google V8, as well as Mozilla &#x2F; Apple providing competition, Lua has Mike Pall. Basically all these Dynamic Langauges has had million of dollars &#x2F; man hours working on it for a long time.<p>In Ruby? If it wasn&#x27;t for ko1 YARV Ruby is still very slow here.<p>So why all of a sudden we have two solution here that offer a magnitude of speed increase? My guess is that it created an interest within the Academic, VM Research Community, if they have to prove their VM ( OMR &#x2F; Graal ) to work, they will have to choose one of the hardest, yet to optimized language to work on. I guess that is why both effort happens to be on Ruby.