Not sure if they will gain a lot of performance from this transition...according to shootout ( http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programming-lan... ) python is only few % faster than ruby. Maybe they should consider porting their entire ecosystem to JVM as twitter did it.
The thing about the programming language shootout is that the benchmarks are optimized to within an inch of their life, and in particular don't generate much garbage. This may have changed, but last time I checked (MRI) Ruby's garbage collector was _stunningly_ slow.
performance of a web app is quite likely more dependent on factors other than the raw interpreter speed, e.g. straight rack apps could easily be five times faster than rails apps using the same interpreter.
Really? I've heard both that claim and it's c.ounterclaim several times and come to the conclusion that it's an interesting yet ultimately futile discussion.
Not at all. You can be more productive in another language for reasons that have nothing to do with the merits of either language. For instance, the Justin.tv guys already use a lot of Python in their stack outside the RoR app server.
