Comment by pdimitar

> But why not simply write the code that needs to be fast in C and then use call it from Ruby?

Because often that's a can of worms and because people are not as good with C as they think they are, as evidenced by plenty of CVEs and the famous example of quadratic performance degradation in parsing a JSON file when the GTA V game starts -- something that a fan had to decompile and fix themselves.

For scripting these days I tend to author small Golang programs if bash gets unwieldy (which it quickly does; get to 100+ lines of script and you start hitting plenty of annoyances). Seems to work really well, plus Golang has community libraries that emulate various UNIX tools and I found them quite adequate.

But back to the previous comments, IMO both bash and Ruby are quite fine for basic scripting... if you don't care about startup time. I do care in some of my workflows, hence I made scripts that pipe various Golang / Rust programs to empower my flow. But again, for many tasks this is not needed.