In order to eliminate the potential bias of startup time I run similar test in many iterations. Here's what I got:

    $ time ruby -e "10000.times { puts 'hello world' }" > /dev/null
    real    0m0.102s
    user    0m0.096s
    sys     0m0.005s

and

    $ time ./topaz -e "10000.times { puts 'hello world' }" > /dev/null
    real    0m0.098s
    user    0m0.071s
    sys     0m0.026s

Any idea why I don't see such big difference?