I'm not a web or compiler/interpreter dev so this is probably a noob question but here it goes anyway. If the main complain about ruby is that it is slow then why not trying to make it faster? I don't know how easy or feasible that is but is there an effort towards that?
In my experience this is mostly relevant to people writing benchmark blog posts. Certainly not entirely, but I've worked on a few apps that would easily be considered "at scale" and 99% of the time, speed issues with the language itself are dwarfed by database performance and issues with the code written in that language.
There is. Ruby's speed is roughly comparable with Python today, and the Ruby 3 push is largely around performance. However, you've got to remember that Rails took off on a generation of Ruby VM architecture much slower than currently available. There's a very large set of problems which Rails works for where the interpreter just isn't the bottleneck.
On the other side of the equation, the reason Ruby has taken such a (comparatively) long time to make fast is that the language does a bunch of stuff that is just really hard to optimise. Not only that, but those facilities (like... defining methods on core classes at arbitrary points of execution, for instance) turn out to have been quite heavily used, so it's not reasonable to remove those facilities in the name of speed.
Absolutely. Ruby has had major performance improvements. Plus there's also JRuby for those that want access to the Java ecosystem. Alternatively we can detect bottlenecks and re-write those in a different language, such as Rust.
