Congratulations Ruby team! I'm excited to hear about the performance improvements. It seems like JIT could be a huge win since calling a method requires checking all kinds of possibilities that are almost always not used, but might be. I would love to keep all the power & fun of Ruby without worrying so much about performance.
Speaking of optimizing method calls: now that it's been a few years, I wonder what Ruby folks think about refinements. Are you using them? Are they helpful? Horrible?
I remember reading from the JRuby folks that refinements would make Ruby method calls slower---and not just refined calls, but all method calls [1], although it sounds like that changed some before they were released [2]. It seems like people stopped talking about this after they came out, so I'm wondering if refinements are still a challenge when optimizing Ruby? I guess MRI JIT will face the same challenges as the Java implementation?
[1] http://blog.headius.com/2012/11/refining-ruby.html
[2] https://github.com/jruby/jruby/issues/1062