This is interesting. I really do like Ruby and have used Rails as my go-to on a lot of projects because of simplicity and the general support of the ecosystem so if Ruby could maintain its great experience while getting way better under the hood it could mean great things for the language.
Yeah I think this is very exciting and this sort of development could be of great importance for programming in the future. There are certainly more possible complaints than performance with Ruby but when you take a top layer that people are generally pretty satisfied with and make it much better under the hood, you are going to have a big impact.
This idea is what made me excited to read about this and reach out to Chris to conduct this interview.
"Hey Dave, that intern kid starts today. Shall just I send him to get coffee and donuts?"
"Nah, I was going just to ask him to make Ruby massively faster, something many super-smart people have been trying to do for years with no success."
"Ok, that should keep him out of our way at least."