OK folks, help me out here. I&#x27;m not trying to troll, this is a genuine question.<p>In the not-so-distant-past, one of the reasons why a good number of developers&#x2F;projects announced they were moving away from Ruby and using other languages&#x2F;compilers was due to Ruby&#x27;s slow performance—and not just that Ruby was slow, but that Ruby was slow due to the actual nature of the language. In other words, Ruby was destined to always be slow, so it didn&#x27;t make sense to invest in making Ruby faster because that&#x27;s, to a certain extent, a fool&#x27;s errand.<p>Now we&#x27;re actually seeing a number of initiatives that are claiming to take Ruby into performance arenas that are an order of magnitude faster than before. And not just the compiler level, but all through the stack: faster app servers, faster libraries, faster frameworks, etc.<p>So that&#x27;s all very exciting, and I&#x27;m super thrilled as a Ruby developer, but here&#x27;s my question: if Ruby <i>can</i> actually be a relatively fast language, what was going on before? Were the &quot;Ruby will always be slow&quot; people simply wrong? Or are there some new breakthroughs in compiler design that make it much more feasible for such a dynamic language as Ruby to be more performant? Inquiring minds want to know!