I should have clarified that I meant "compiled easily for 10-100x speedup" (on representative workloads) as the OP was saying. You can definitely compile anyth

I should have clarified that I meant "compiled easily for 10-100x speedup" (on representative workloads) as the OP was saying. You can definitely compile anything... whether it's worthwhile is a totally different story. I learned this the hard way :) As far as I remember the Ruby 3x3 effort yielded 3x on SOME workloads, with tremendous effort, which is about what I would have expected due to Ruby's very dynamic semantics.