If larger companies (eg. Stripe) would put more effort into improving Crystal instead of improving Ruby, Crystal would absolutely blow Ruby out of the water. Instead we get improvements to Ruby because larger companies have larger codebases and don't want to refactor everything all at once. They'd rather slowly add type annotations to their Ruby codebase until eventually it's all done. I get it, it's better from a business perspective short term. In the long term, Crystal would be able to run at least hundreds of times faster than Ruby.