On WhyTheLuckyStiff’s blog I found info on merging YARV to Ruby. YARV it is acronym for Yet Another Ruby Virtual Machine. Nice to know, that finally path to make Ruby programs faster is becoming reality.
However YARV needs support from community. It is developed by one person, and if merge with Ruby should end well, help is needed. Read more on plans how merge will be done in SASADA Koich (YARV’s author) post
Rails are running already in this environment (check on Shugo’s Blog) but I did not found speed benchmarks. Currently YARV offers speedup up to 20 times, but only for some algorithms, for others there is no improvements.