Is it possible to substantially increase Ruby's execution speed by
compiling it to an EXE file?

I think I heard about a project somewhere that's like Jython, which
can compile Ruby to Java bytecode. If that exists, then, one could
compile the Java bytecode to an optimized native executable using GCJ
or another commercial Java bytecode to EXE tool.

Does this exist? If so, how well/fast does it work?