Wow, Rubinius that's certainly a blast from the past. Its great that the project is still ongoing.

I especially like the link at the bottom of the post to the Rubinius book tour http://bit.ly/1wVU4 aka what you can read to fully understand or design a Rubinius.

Faster speed is always good. However, my interest in Rubinius is more of a learning thing. Its really cool to be able to check the implementation of class 'Class' http://bit.ly/fCyIw when you need to or fully understand how some underlying algorithms implemented in the language are put together in just plain old Ruby code (not C).