Ruby 2 is fast! . First experience of running some of my scripts in Ruby 2 was: WOW !!! .
Ruby 2.0.0-p0 is barely out. I was wating for it to appear on RVM radar and today tried it finally. And ... as I said WOW !!!
Look at the numbers below. It's not what you can call a scientific approach for benchmarking, but demonstrates main idea well enough.
Running same small script in 2 Ruby revisions. Ususally second run is faster since some libraries are already preloaded in memory.
Can you see the difference?
ruby-1.9.3-p374
Run First Second
------ -----
real 2.12 1.68
user 1.54 1.53
sys 0.16 0.13
ruby-2.0.0-p0
Run First Second
------ -----
real 0.89 0.66
user 0.59 0.56
sys 0.10 0.09