[sheff]

One of the great things about Ruby at the moment is the number of Ruby implementations around, including several Ruby like languages which attempt to do things slightly differently.

Crystal is one language with Ruby like syntax and the goal of compiling to efficient native code. ( http://crystal-lang.org )

Mirah is another statically typed Ruby like JVM based language, although its development is a bit slow. (http://www.mirah.org)