My first reaction to seeing Rails BITD was to think 'wow this would be so fast done in C++'.
Then about 2 years later, when I began to really understand Ruby and some of the community had shamed the C++isms out of me, it became clear why it was impossible.
Ruby interpretation and introspection makes so much possible in an elegant way - you can bruteforce Rails out of another language but you'll lose a lot of what makes Rails so powerful in the process.
For backoffice webapp use I believe nothing can compete with Rails currently - it's stable, well documented and has awesome library support.
However, highload client performance does not come out of the box, which is part of the reason for the drift to Node or lighter Ruby frameworks.
I don't think you need to make Rails faster, you just need to use it for what it does best (complex backoffice apps and APIs) and use something lighter for the high performance requirements.
I'd agree with this, and append the suggestion that if particular parts of your application have high performance demands, those should actually be decoupled from the main app into API'd services. This tends to make the entire application more elegant while using the appropriate technology for each task.
Then about 2 years later, when I began to really understand Ruby and some of the community had shamed the C++isms out of me, it became clear why it was impossible.
Ruby interpretation and introspection makes so much possible in an elegant way - you can bruteforce Rails out of another language but you'll lose a lot of what makes Rails so powerful in the process.
For backoffice webapp use I believe nothing can compete with Rails currently - it's stable, well documented and has awesome library support.
However, highload client performance does not come out of the box, which is part of the reason for the drift to Node or lighter Ruby frameworks.
I don't think you need to make Rails faster, you just need to use it for what it does best (complex backoffice apps and APIs) and use something lighter for the high performance requirements.