>> As for speed it's useful to distinguish between startup and runtime.

The JVM would like a word. (It has slow startup, but can be very fast at runtime due to JIT optimization and cacheing.)

Scripts should start and run quickly.

Ruby has historically been fairly slow which is why Ruby 3 focused heavily on performance. It has been improving a lot, but I have not seen any benchmarks against other programming languages.

The thing to remember here is that speed is relative. I haven't checked but Ruby 3 is probably faster than Perl 5.0. For most scripting purposes on modern hardware Ruby is plenty fast enough. Whilst there may may be marginal speed differences between Perl, Ruby and Python the differnce is insignificant.