The Story Behind Ruby 1.9.3 Getting 36% Faster Loading Times

This directly relates to a popular HN story from the other day: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2594668" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2594668</a> (in the sense that the solution outlined in that story has sort of been evaded by some optimizations made by Ruby core - temporarily, hopefully).

There's an old solaris rationalization: "It's not the time it takes to reboot, but how often."

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ8YfstVWKs" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ8YfstVWKs</a>

I find this kind of performance regression and the blasé response extremely frustrating and disappointing. What could the MRI team be working on that's more important than fixing a bug that quadruples startup time for the most popular Ruby applications? This should be fixed in a quick patch to 1.9.2. There are tens of thousands of developers wasting oodles of man-hours frustrated with this. It's bad for Ruby and bad for Rails.<p>Why is this not the #1 priority for the MRI team?