Perl versus Ruby fastest programs Always look at the source code. These are only the fastest programs. Do some of them use manually vectorized SIMD? Look at the other programs. They may seem more-like a fair comparison to you. spectral-norm source secs mem gz busy cpu load Perl 24.69 12,188 555 96.59 97% 99% 98% 97% Ruby 118.16 24,764 326 120.08 0% 1% 100% 0% k-nucleotide source secs mem gz busy cpu load Perl 37.72 1,255,884 652 131.45 88% 89% 87% 85% Ruby 77.22 146,188 576 271.55 81% 84% 93% 93% reverse-complement source secs mem gz busy cpu load Perl 6.36 1,495,132 287 6.52 0% 0% 2% 100% Ruby 11.45 2,009,880 482 21.50 34% 70% 57% 26% pidigits source secs mem gz busy cpu load Perl 1.90 8,268 261 2.16 100% 2% 3% 9% Ruby 2.11 541,320 485 4.16 53% 6% 100% 39% regex-redux source secs mem gz busy cpu load Perl 10.10 157,208 820 31.98 96% 67% 93% 61% Ruby 9.66 277,900 724 21.43 44% 96% 38% 43% mandelbrot source secs mem gz busy cpu load Perl 542.82 45,036 586 2,169.30 100% 100% 100% 100% Ruby 262.79 69,328 880 1,049.78 100% 100% 100% 100% fannkuch-redux source secs mem gz busy cpu load Perl 392.54 12,116 570 1,568.84 100% 100% 100% 100% Ruby 181.72 26,276 1455 716.75 99% 100% 99% 96% binary-trees source secs mem gz busy cpu load Perl 53.02 1,048,568 797 195.75 91% 88% 100% 90% Ruby 23.80 566,560 1008 67.07 58% 96% 63% 64% n-body source secs mem gz busy cpu load Perl 419.75 6,388 1429 429.50 1% 1% 1% 100% Ruby 188.10 23,088 1163 191.79 0% 1% 1% 100% fasta source secs mem gz busy cpu load Perl 58.08 55,188 871 59.16 1% 100% 1% 0% Ruby 25.63 120,804 1069 28.41 0% 10% 100% 1% Perl This is perl 5, version 32, subversion 0 (v5.32.0) built for x86_64-linux-thread-multi Ruby ruby 3.0.0p0 (2020-12-25 revision 95aff21468) [x86_64-linux] --jit all Perl programs & measurements all Ruby programs & measurements