It might make more sense to adapt some of the implementation tricks
from POC or the GCC libobjc runtime to get the Ruby runtime overhead
down closer to that of Objective-C. However, in order to get
competitive performance, you're still going to have to either JIT or
inline C code in places; doing runtime method dispatch for operations
on native ints and chars is never going to be as fast as a compiled
version.

Lennon