Interestingly, Facebook sponsored a project to build a prototype PHP interpreter using the PyPy[0] toolchain for JIT compilation, which turned out to be even faster than HipHop[1]. I have to wonder whether statically compiled Ruby would actually be any faster than a JIT interpreter like Rubinius, cold start JIT penalty aside.
Edit: looks like JRuby can/does do JIT compilation, but it is also capable of doing AOT compilation[2]. If JRuby can do AOT, then what is the point of FastRuby?
[0]: http://pypy.org/
[1]: http://morepypy.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/hello-everyone.html