Ruby is also quite slow. The last benchmarks I saw makes it pretty clear Raku has closed the gap with Ruby (at least the mainline C implementation of Ruby) on a lot of fronts, and is likely to be faster for many things in another year or two and the VM gets better at optimization. My google fu isn't up to finding those benchmark results now, but it's no secret that Ruby is pretty sluggish compared to Perl 5.
I sure hope it will be faster because in my own tests it's slower than Tcl. And I've tested at least two releases a year since october 2016 when the stable Rakudo came out.
Ruby 2.5 has a jit which uses the C compiler to generate dynamically linked objects. It looks more like a workaround but it produces fast code. Then there's Jruby, Rubinius, Truffle, mruby. Crystal too, which is a different language but yet similar. No need to learn Go. Just take your Ruby background and pretty much start using it for writing Crystal.
