Performance is tricky (Score 1)

Performance is a tricky thing to measure accurately here. Unfortunately, Sun spends more time optimizing its Virtual Machine for Intel architectures than it does for PowerPC architectures. This is simply because Intel accounts for more of the market. The result of this is that Java apps often run faster on Intel than they do on PowerPC or even Sun's own SPARC processors.

I'd be interested to see some performance numbers on an Intel based architecture.

However, I'm most compelled by some code maintenance aspects of Ruby. As a Java and .NET developer, maybe it's time I take a look at Ruby.