Mike Pall's LuaJIT[0] is excellent from a game dev perspective--incremental GC (so you can spend a fixed amount of your frame budget in it) and JIT with a huge

Mike Pall's LuaJIT[0] is excellent from a game dev perspective--incremental GC (so you can spend a fixed amount of your frame budget in it) and JIT with a huge number of optimisation make it fairly compelling to write the top 50% of your game in (and not a terrible choice for the bottom 50%). I think you were absolutely right to switch from Ruby, I can't see the problems that you had getting any better unless Ruby lets you manage object allocation (in which case you could allocate to a per-frame memory buffer and just nuke it at the end of every frame). [0] http://luajit.org/ http://luajit.org/