[ljm]

I wonder what happened to that old planned feature where the ruby code would be byte-compiled into .rbc files?

[byroot]

The capability is there since 2.3 at least, but Matz doesn't want it by default, and prefer to leave it to libraries.

If you use bootsnap, you use ".rbc" files already.

Source: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/16847#note-14