I'm suprised that no one has mentioned JRuby in this context put here is a great post related to your question: http://blog.headius.com/2009/04/how-jruby-makes

I'm suprised that no one has mentioned JRuby in this context put here is a great post related to your question: http://blog.headius.com/2009/04/how-jruby-makes-ruby-fast.html http://blog.headius.com/2009/04/how-jruby-makes-ruby-fast.ht... This post shows how if you turn off certain Ruby language features you can make it much faster. Then he shows how his Ruby-like but static language is much faster.