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I am dissapointed: tried running it on a utility I wrote for crunching Wikipedia text (lots of string operations, some file IO) and it is so much slower than Ruby 1.9.1. I stopped the benchmark after 5 minutes (same test took about 70 seconds with Ruby 1.9.1). Then I tried a simple string manipulation benchmark, and it ran about 3 times slower in MacRuby.

Using Cocoa classes in MacRuby is great for Mac development but (apparently) really slows down string operations.

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As I understand it, the focus up 'til now has been correctness and compatibility rather than performance / efficiency. It seems a bit early to jump on them for that (though the speed hit you mention is surprising). That said, I'd expect things to pick up speed once the next-generation compiler Laurent mentions in the blog post is ready (and when the RubySpec needle moves closer to 100).

Regardless, the team has made a ton of progress since the last release. Here's looking forward to the next.

There has been work on performance; in a lot of cases, MacRuby is faster than YARV. Just, not in this case, with strings. Thats mostly because strings were just redone to use NSString's internally, so there hasn't been as much work done on them as there has in other parts.

Look back on how JRuby developed. At first the concerns were to make sure you could simply run Ruby code. But over time that became a given, and speed became the new focus. They've done quite well and I expect the MacRuby team to do so as also.