Does it matter, nope. I think this is just leftover annoyances from pre 1.9 mri perfomance is all. As to compiling ruby to c, maybe, as long as its not eval()

Does it matter, nope. I think this is just leftover annoyances from pre 1.9 mri perfomance is all. As to compiling ruby to c, maybe, as long as its not eval()'ing ruby code. But rubinius+llvm+its jit would be the closest to what you're talking about. That or jruby too.