SmallRuby

Claus Gittinger (creator of Smalltalk/X) was already able to run Java on his unified virtual machine (see this paper). Thats nothing new.

But it looks like Smalltalk/X is now also able to run Ruby. The project is called SmallRuby - an implementation of Ruby programming language for Smalltalk/X virtual machine done at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering Czech Technical University In Prague.

According to the website the results are amazing. For example, in methodCall benchmark, SmallRuby is 40 times faster than Ruby 1.8. SmallRuby exception handling is much slower than in YARV (Ruby 1.9), but still faster than Ruby 1.8 a JRuby.

There is a presentation available and there are already some news about it available from ESUG 2009.