http://engineering.appfolio.com/appfolio-engineering/2015/11...
> At RubyConf 2015 in San Antonio, Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto announced Ruby 3x3. The goal of Ruby 3x3 is to make Ruby 3 be 3 times faster than Ruby 2.
That's speaking as someone who works full time on optimising Ruby, and wrote a PhD on it.
I think the one hope is that Evan Phoenix suggested an idea that would let an LLVM JIT optimise through the Ruby implementation, but this is a full-on research project (he said it wasn't, I'm not sure I agree), and nobody is working on it.
http://www.slideshare.net/MatthewGaudet/experiments-in-shari...
It proposes a very interesting path for Ruby to get way faster, without resorting to the JRuby implementation.
Basically what he's proposing is we could compile all the Ruby Stdlib ahead of time to a LLVM kind of bytecode. Once you do that, a JIT compiler for Ruby code could perform a way deeper optimization, because the compiler horizon-line will be stretched much further away: the compiler will be able to inspect the Stdlib bytecode and make optimizations to your Ruby code taking all that into account!
This could be a revolutionary approach for MRI, please go see the talk, it's really interesting!