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title: "Ruby Compendium – Quick Tour"
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<nav class="navigation"><a href="/ruby-compendium/book/notes.html">← About this Book</a> | <a href="/ruby-compendium/book/index.html">Contents</a> | <a href="/ruby-compendium/book/ten-good-things.html">10 Good Things about Ruby →</a></nav>
<p>Ruby is a relatively new programming language. It was created by <a href="/ruby-compendium/book/rubyists.html#matz">Yukihiro Matzumoto</a> (aka &#8220;Matz&#8221;) in 1995, but it took another ten years to become popular outside Japan, thanks to the <em>Ruby on Rails</em> web framework.</p>
<aside class="box">
<div class="box-title">Isn't Ruby <em>slow?</em></div>
<p>Being a high-level, interpreted language, Ruby is slower than compiled languages like C or C++ or even other interpreted languages like Perl 5. However, this may vary depending on the implementation.</p>
<ul>
	<li>If you are interested in Ruby benchmarks, check out Antonio Cangiano&#8217;s <a href="http://programmingzen.com/2010/07/19/the-great-ruby-shootout-july-2010/">Great Ruby Shootout</a>, which also includes data on <a href="http://www.rubyenterpriseedition.com/">Ruby Enterprise Edition</a> and <a href="http://ruby.gemstone.com/">MagLev</a> implementations.</li>
	<li>If you are interested in benchmarks between Ruby implementations and other languages, the <a href="http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/">Computer Language Benchmark Game</a> is a good place to start.</li>
</ul>

</aside>
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