Grails vs Rails... The number game just started!

A first Grails vs Rails Performance benchmark has just been published The benchmark shows that Grails is faster than Rails. Rails developer Jared Richardsons commented on some flaws with the benchmark (aren't all benchmarks flawed in some way? And as the benchmark author said, the benchmark is not about scalability).

But looking at these numbers, I found that Rails is not far behind Rails. And I find that very encouraging for the Rails community. Yes, I would expect much better performance on the Grails side... Most of Grails is Java code. Java code running inside a modern JVM should run pretty fast. But beside the insert test (which I guess is significantly slower due having just one Mongrel instance running), Grails is not very far ahead Rails. Rails is mostly Ruby code. The Ruby interpreter is just that, an interpreter. There is no just-in-time compilation, no enhanced optimization for often used code in Ruby.

I can't wait till we have Ruby running on some VM (maybe the JRuby team will run the same benchmark and give us their numbers) and I guess we will see some great improvement on the Rails side (I guess that just rerunning the benchmark with multiple Mongrel instances will close much of the current gap).

This may be the very start of the Grails vs Rails number game!