As a longtime user of Ruby, improving performance is by far the primary thing I want out of the MRI team. Erlang-style pattern matching would be nice but I can'

As a longtime user of Ruby, improving performance is by far the primary thing I want out of the MRI team. Erlang-style pattern matching would be nice but I can't say I'm hurting for its absence. One of the topics that's been discussed for a long time is breaking the standard library into gems (installed by default), so they can be developed and improved separately from the core language. That's probably the #2 priority for me. One of Ruby's strengths (and sometimes one of its weaknesses, too) is that it has a fairly decentralized ecosystem. The standard library is small and has had few additions since Rubygems was added to the core distribution. Frankly, it could stand to have more taken out of it. Ruby is already a pretty big language (in terms of core features and syntactic complexity); I think the core team is well-advised to exercise caution in adding new features.