What's the goal of the project? It's not clear from the Github repo or the site (natalie-lang.org).
> It provides an ahead-of-time compiler using C++ and gcc/clang as the backend
Which is kind of the new "in" lately.
EDIT: If you see the the animation in the GitHub repo, you'll see at a certain point a file named "bs" (which is a binary file). I guess the standard Ruby compiler doesn't allow you to spit out binaries out of the box (?).
Ruby is an interpreted language, programs are not compiled (except for the JIT compiler).
I wonder what makes this different from mruby[1] which seems to be very well supported for many years.
You can make almost any general purpose language "compiled", depending on how fat you're willing to make the runtime. And you can certainly create an interpreter/JIT VM for C/C++. It's not a question of possibility, but one of "why?".
I say some applications because there are still people using Ruby to write non-web things, and I doubt if this project will ever support Rails in the short term
Even if it only ends up compiling a subset of Ruby, it could be a foundation for a Ruby equivalent of one of the several tools for accelerating Python by compiling a subset and allowing it to interface with regular interpreted code.