It tends to hang out at the bottom of the Shootout [1]. Its phenomenal cosmic powers come at a price. But note that the ratio of Ruby to Python or Perl is generally within 2x.

(The Shootout is not the One True Measure of speed... but it isn't meaningless, either.)

Generally the only thing this really means though is that you wouldn't want to do hard-core computation in pure Perl/Ruby/Python, hence things like NumPy. [1]: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programming-lan...