I'd be interested to hear what a ruby core dev has to say about this, aren't they working on an embedded version of the MRI? Otherwise, I'm not in favor of not being able to manage memory, some might think its a pain but when you have no memory, then you want to be able to crunch every byte when you need it. I think it could be interesting though, ruby is a very HL abstracted language, and if it gave you enough control it could make writing embedded programs a lot easier.