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Maybe rubinius will fill this need? http://rubini.us/

Also, this could be an interesting read: http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2010/making-ruby-fast-the-rub...

but what is the status of rubinius? is it nearly as far along as pypy?

I would think that the metaprogramming features of ruby which make it so much fun would also make it n times harder to build a JIT for.

I think the second link I posted in my previous comment could help you get a grasp about what they are doing in respect to the dynamic nature of the language and JIT.

Here is the current status towards 1.9 implementation: http://status.rubini.us/

From the frontpage:

"How compatible is Rubinius? From the start, compatibility has been critical to us. To that end, we created the RubySpec to ensure that we maintained parity with official Ruby. We are currently at a 93% RubySpec pass rate and growing everyday. For now Rubinius is targeting MRI 1.8.7 (1.9 is on the post 1.0 list). Most Gems, Rails plugins and C-Extensions work right out of the box. If you find a bug, let us know and we'll get on top of it."

The dynamic features of ruby are not so different than those of python, lua, or javascript. Actually in terms of reasonable memory consumption I think rubinius is quite a bit better than pypy.

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