There's a few of us at Oracle working on an alternative backend via JRuby, as well. Chris Seaton gave a talk on it at RubyConf last week. He has a series of p

There's a few of us at Oracle working on an alternative backend via JRuby, as well. Chris Seaton gave a talk on it at RubyConf last week. He has a series of posts about it that are pretty good: http://www.chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/ http://www.chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/ Obviously, this isn't people being directly paid to work on MRI, but there are side benefits like a richer set of rubyspecs and sometimes fixes landing in MRI.