> Ruby core (“MRI”) itself has sunk an enormous amount of time into performance improvements in Ruby 1.9, going so far as to completely rewrite the core VM from scratch.
This isn't particularly accurate, my understanding is that what became the 1.9 VM was originally an external fork (or rewrite, I'm not clear on which) known as YARV, which was later integrated, but was not originally developed by the MRI team. As always feel free to tell me I'm a moron who has no idea what he's talking about.
YARV was an external fork that was integrated into MRI pretty early, and then worked on by the core team for several years. My point was simply that YARV's existence and the commitment of the core team to get it into core (and the resulting performance improvements) disprove the idea that the Ruby core team doesn't care about performance.
This isn't particularly accurate, my understanding is that what became the 1.9 VM was originally an external fork (or rewrite, I'm not clear on which) known as YARV, which was later integrated, but was not originally developed by the MRI team. As always feel free to tell me I'm a moron who has no idea what he's talking about.