For parts of the Ruby ecosystem running production workloads, such as the Liquid template engine, I see 6x performance today. I think that's a realistic goal in time.

I'm aiming for around 6-10x for real production code.

> Does it ever seen like a lot more trouble to try to optimize ruby instead of just writing slow parts in a different language?

I'm pretty philosophical about this.

People want to write and run Ruby code. I trust they've got their own good reason for that. Taking that as a given, I want to let them run it as fast as they can, with the best tooling I can give them. Instead of 'you shouldn't do that' I want to have the attitude of 'ok we'll see what we can do'.

I do personally really like Ruby and I reach for it pretty much whenever I start a new project.