I suspect there's not just one cause of slowness here. Pure language benchmarks also tend to rank Ruby very low. So I'd wager that a fast Ruby framework would still lose to a fast Go framework.
Absolutely, I should maybe clarify that I did not mean to say that we can fully rule out the language itself as a cause of the poor performance, Ruby always perform worse than Go in this example for obvious reasons.
But, saying that the frameworks using the language under the hood has almost no relevancy is wrong in my opinion! And that is what I was trying to point out.
> But, saying that the frameworks using the language under the hood has almost no relevancy is wrong in my opinion!
I did not claim that in general sense, I said it with the context that even if Ruby got accelerated a lot then that's still kind of inconsequential because most Ruby usage is Rails.
Apples to oranges again. A more relevant comparison would be Ruby to Python and in recent years Ruby has edged ahead in performance if you factor-out Python's C-based libraries such as Numpy.
If we're comparing "programming languages that can be used to make websites" then it's totally apples to apples. Ruby and Go (and Rust, Java, etc) are all valid options and so I think it's smart to compare them before starting a web project.
I haven’t used Python in years but from what I’ve understood by reading other comments, factoring out C-based libraries would rule out a large portion of what makes Python so popular. Especially on the scientific side.
The performance can vary drastically depending on which Ruby framework you use, so it's not due to the language but the upper layer instead.
Note, even if Rails is the most popular framework, there is still other alternatives which makes it even more relevant to the performance impact.