the "too slow argument" is normally based on old internet opinions and benchmarks.. ruby today is pretty fast. In the company that I work, we do a lot of system programming using ruby, web development, etc.. It came to substitute perl around 2005, and we still using it successfully today. When we need something really, really fast, specially including parallel processing and etc, we just use jruby.

To think I'd live to see the day the JVM is regarded as "really, really fast".

Ruby is not "pretty fast". The hardware you run it on is insanely, mind bogglingly, out of this world fast and so people don't notice the way that they used to.

...which is fine, you don't always need to be fast. Just be wary of misattribution.

Truffleruby is "A high performance implementation of the Ruby programming language, built on GraalVM." If you prefer there is even a rust based ruby https://github.com/artichoke/artichoke

again, IMO, the microbenchmark, doesn't matter. What matters is the problem domain, whole stack and the whole "speed", including development, deployment and etc, and for some domains, ruby is the best and fast choice.