I personally believe the MRI core devs have done a great job of moving YARV and Ruby 1.9.x forward. We would not have added 1.9.2 support had they not cleaned it up and made it a really compelling set of features.

YARV may start to lag behind in performance measurements, but it's already faster than many popular runtimes (Python, for example) and there's nothing stopping them from making more drastic moves to improve it (adding JIT or concurrent threading).

And of course they are still the reference implementation; we want them to continue to push the boundaries of what Ruby can do, and continue to challenge us with new features.

U kidding? JRuby is slow to startup. The performance increase isn't realized until the JVM "warms" up. Good luck running JRuby on a 512MB VPS.

I would guess no.

You have to care to be embarrassed.

Imagine if this much effort had gone into 1.9.2 instead?