The Carbone Ruby VM

"But with code that recurses or calls other methods that are implemented in Ruby (better said: Carbon input language). From obvious reasons the mentioned improvment factor will go down to zero when spending all the time in builtins; (long running builtins, not Fixnum#+; but this effect begins with it). One may say snippets that do no work are producing larger speed improvments; but this is also the kind of code one calls object oriented; i.e. many levels of indirection, abstraction ....."

Two issues with this paragraph:

1) "Carbon input language" makes me think that I can't use the full breadth of Ruby. If I can't use the full breadth of Ruby it's not a Ruby VM.

2) I'm not really grokking the "snippets that do no work" portion, but given that Ruby (or at least the Rails/Sinatra flavors) are all about interdependent, highly-OO flavored code what audience is this VM targeting?

Why do they call a site promoting free software nongnu? I was curious but nothing jumped out at me as a link to a quick answer.

EDIT: Thank you both. So, non-GNU = "not, officially GNU" instead of anti-GNU I was wondering about. That makes sense.

looks to be from 2002, all source in CVS.