Ruby is a powerful and dynamic open-source object-oriented language we have been using extensively at CC in the last few years for the web applications that manage and coordinate authoring and deployment of activities based on the SAIL/OTrunk framework.

The standard Ruby VM is written in C and we’ve been using version 1.8.6, the latest stable release on our servers. A beta version of the next major release, version 1.9.1 has recently been released.

Ruby 1.9 looks to be about twice as fast as Ruby 1.8.6.

I’m even more impressed by the recent performance increases in JRuby however. This is a version of Ruby that runs in Java. Programs written in JRuby can easily access code written in Java which makes integration with the rest of our Java codebase much easier.

A year ago programs written in JRuby were often slower than ones written in version 1.8.6 of C Ruby. Now for some benchmarks JRuby is twice as fast as Ruby 1.9.

More details about some of these measurements are here:

Ruby 1.8.6, 1.9, and JRuby running on Java 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7 compared