I don't think ruby will ever get to the point where it's useful or a good fit in every context. The optimization goals are pretty clearly laid out: developer performance and happiness over raw speed of the language. A lot of features don't lend themselves to easy performance optimization (open classes, the ability to change methods on individual objects, lots of the metaprogramming features etc.). It's just not ruby's goal to be fast on every platform and in every context. It's often fast enough, though.