That benchmark performs string manipulations that rarely occur in web apps. Web apps need: concatenation, substring, find/replace, maybe with regexps. All of those are implemented in C.
> memory allocation
Web apps don't tend to implement entire trees in pure Ruby. That benchmark is completely non-representative of real-world performance.
What exactly are you getting at? Of course it's easy to find a bunch of synthetic benchmarks that show weaknesses in particular cases. Still doesn't prove anything.
It's only about 4x slower than pure C in this case, and only a little slower than Java which has a very good JIT.
> You don't seem to know what is shown on the benchmarks game website.
How funny of you to say that while acting as if the benchmarks "prove" Ruby is the ultimate spawn of the devil that eats away any and all performance. The website itself tells you not to jump to conclusions and that the app itself is the ultimate benchmark: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/dont-jump-to-conclus...
regex-dna reads 50MB; k-nucleotide, reverse-complement read 250MB
>> …offloaded to native libraries… So the alioth benchmarks are not representative of real-world performance. <<
The benchmarks game does show C programs ;-)
The benchmarks game does show scripting-languages explicitly using native libraries:
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/program.php?tes...