Finally a solution that can makes Rails more competitive
Maybe for a start, making a statically typed Sinatra rather than Rails would be a more affordable task.
But anyway I'm not sure this is the right direction for Ruby as I think that more radical and different changes are needed to extract the full potential out of it.
Anyway if Infrared proves to be a nice and quick alternative solution that will let us gain back some lost terrain in those situations where Ruby was discarded because of performance, then I more then welcome it, hoping that a some point the efforts put in it will somehow also be useful to Ruby MRI (or whatever the Ruby reference implementation will be at that time) improvement..
Yes: Not doing it.
> in those situations where Ruby was discarded because of performance
In most cases where Ruby gets discarded because of performance, it's a red herring. Most of Ruby's main uses are in areas where you can generally make things IO bound fairly easily.
For my part, I don't believe Ruby needs static typing to get far more performant. I'm working on a Ruby compiler, and while it's far from usable, from looking at MRI in particular it's worth noting that MRI implements pretty much nothing of the last 30 years or so of dynamic language optimizations.
Look towards JRuby today, and especially the Truffle backend, for indications of where Ruby optimizations can be going without sacrificing what makes the language attractive in the process.
That's not to say there aren't warts that makes it harder than necessary, but you can get very far with far less impact on the language than taking away dynamic typing.
It trades execution performance for developer performance. If you prefer faster execution and slower dev then another framework might be more appropriate.