Yes, Matz and Ko1-san is working on Ruby 2.0 (Rite). They also say that this won't be here for at least 18 months, and at that point the VM still needs to support older extensions, which means the architecture is severely limited. It won't be possible for Rite to get that far ahead of Ruby 1.8 in terms of speed. But, regarding JRuby and speed; Right now JRuby is interpreted. The current planning includes basic JIT compilation to byte code for Ruby scripts. This could easily give JRuby as much performance as MRI in a few months.