After finding this link I got the crazy idea to write the core of the VM in C. I am quite certain it would give a good bit of speed boost especially concidering that at this point speed might matter.

What is the downside? Well I can think of two – it is way more likely that I mess up something in C and thus create a bug that allows harm the system the VM runs, the second is … our best friend Microsoft Windows. Also I’ll have to look into how JRuby handles things like ruby extensions.

So I was thinking to package the whole thing with two versions of the VM core, one written in C if you are either trustfully or sure enough bugs won’t harm too much or speed does matter a lot for you. Then a second version written in pure ruby which would likely be a good bit slower but only bugs in the ruby interpreter would be a concern.

Any thoughts?