3x increase when 3.0 is compared to 2.0[1]. I think it was largely achieved.

[1] https://blog.heroku.com/ruby-3-by-3

That would have been almost impossible.

Ruby was never designed as a “fast” language, but 3x is a huge number for anything this mature.

Looking at the benchmark game, it seems 3x current performance would put it in the company of racket, which is still noticably slower than node js. While right now it is much closer to python.

All benchmarks are misleading but it shows 10x slower than java, lisp, and pascal. Is there a reason that isn't actually representative of idiomatic use?

The benchmarks in the benchmark game are typically CPU bound, which heavily favors compiled languages for obvious reasons.

With regards to what "idiomatic use" is for Ruby, we could argue that most ruby apps are web backends and most of those spend the majority of their waiting for DB and/or API calls and don't spend all that much doing work in actual Ruby.

The same could be said for python with calls into numpy and pytorch consuming much of the time, but no one calls it designed for speed.

It is for many workloads. Just not Rails.