Perl, Tcl, Smalltalk etc are basically non-existant from where I'm from, so they didn't occur to me.
Perhaps I'm projecting a lot here. I have worked a lot in high performance systems and am often triggered by claims of performance, eg. 'X is faster than C' when this is 99.9% of the times false by two orders of magnitude. This didn't happen here.
Thank you for taking the time to answer.
Two very dynamic systems, designed for being a complete graphical workstation, Perl, Tcl, Python, Ruby were as originially implemented, not even close of the original Smalltalk JIT paper from Peter Deutsch's paper"Efficient Implementation of the Smalltalk-80 System." in 1984!
Oh not at all, no I didn't think that. I'm enjoying the conversation.
It's interesting that you mention Smalltalk as I believe that some of the JIT ideas we're seeing in YJIT are borrowed from there.
As for all the "faster than C" talk here is very specific to ruby (or JIT'd) runtimes and overheads only in that context.
I think it gets mentioned because it seems so counter intuitive at first. It's not to imply C isn't orders of magnitude faster in general.
Along with the new out of the box features of Rails 8, the work on Ruby infrastructure is making it an exciting technology to work with again (IMHO).