Ruby and Date classes

I’d seen this somewhere before, but thought I’d benchmark it to see if it was true.  Ruby has 3 classes for doing dates.  There is Date, DateTime and Time classes.  In languages like C# and PHP, the equivalent DateTime class is the one that is generally utilized to do date/time manipulations.  However, in Ruby, DateTime and Time are nearly identical classes, the difference being that DateTime is a convenience class.  Benchmarking shows the DateTime class to be 20-25 times slower than the native Time class.  After doing a little research, the reason is clear.  The Time class is a native class developed in C, the DateTime is a wrapper class written in Ruby.  So while I rarely have occasion to do time manipulation in a loop — it would seem that the DateTime class should pretty much always be avoided.  In fact, I can’t see why the DateTime class exists.  I don’t see what it does that isn’t available in either the Date class or Time class. 

–TR