You should give crystal a go for the parts you need to be performant! You can even prototype those parts in ruby and easily convert to crystal when it becomes necessary. We’ve found a really nice balance, with business logic and interfaces in Ruby/Rails and crystal for AI/data processing.
Oooh, that sounds interesting. Where would be a good place to start with Crystal assuming I specifically want to use it for AI/data processing with Rails business logic / interfaces?
In terms of data science, python is my go-to and much more tooled for that kind of work. For any kind of desktop app I'll use C++, and for browser extensions / add-ons it's JavaScript.