I remember looking at BSON de/serializers for some perceived performance issue a while back, ruby was only marginally slower than PHP for the same task, which was just pulling big record sets back from the db. Can you elaborate?
It was about maybe late last year/Jan this year. When you say intermediate language, do you mean PHP has a bytecode interpreter instead of AST? At the time I looked at it, to convince myself there was no issue with Ruby, I actually hooked up the same table/query to PHP and used PHP's excellent profiling tools, then compared those to the Rails profiler. There wasn't a great difference. PHP was faster sure, but there was definitely no knocking Ruby's speed.
