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One of the big challenges facing the JRuby community today is the prevalence of gems with C extensions. For gems where the C source is available, this might be a viable route to compatibility.

For anyone trying to crack that problem, this is definitely worth deeper investigation.

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This would require a compatibility layer for the MRI C API, which would be difficult but probably doable.

It would only solve part of the problem, though: many of the C extensions exist as bindings to existing C libraries. This wouldn't solve that unless the entire library were compiled this way.

There's libffi for the latter problem, though. It's still work, obviously, but probably less.

if the performance is acceptable, sure, why not.

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