I love your commitment to purity here. Things could certainly be made much faster in Ruby if most of what makes it useful in certain contexts were abandoned. The complexity of invocation alone seems to be fairly unique with the potentially vast tree of class/module hierarchy along with metaclass, method_missing, and first-class, dynamic invocation targets (classes and modules).
I think many people don't realize that "Ruby is slow" because they're building on libraries that make extensive use of Ruby's dynamism with little regard given to performance. Imagine implementing Rails without *eval, method_missing and singleton classes.
Pull up a Rails console in an application with a few plugins, run "included_modules" on a class, and you'll see how many potential modules are involved in invocation. The last Rails project I worked on has 61 modules included into ActiveRecord::Base, mostly by plugins. I think there is plenty of abuse of the extension facilities that results in this type of overhead (what justifies Ym4r::GmPlugin getting included into Class?), but this is the world in which we live.
I think many people don't realize that "Ruby is slow" because they're building on libraries that make extensive use of Ruby's dynamism with little regard given to performance. Imagine implementing Rails without *eval, method_missing and singleton classes.
Pull up a Rails console in an application with a few plugins, run "included_modules" on a class, and you'll see how many potential modules are involved in invocation. The last Rails project I worked on has 61 modules included into ActiveRecord::Base, mostly by plugins. I think there is plenty of abuse of the extension facilities that results in this type of overhead (what justifies Ym4r::GmPlugin getting included into Class?), but this is the world in which we live.