[gary4gar]

    Work on the Ruby interpreter is weirdly silo'ed off and mostly done by Japanese developers, so there's a significant barrier to entry for any enterprising C developer to roll her sleeves up and get hacking.

This is wrong. Ruby Developers welcome contribution in any form. Also, they have various resource to get started:

    Official Contributing Guide: http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.1.1/doc/contributing_rdoc.html
    Ruby Hacking Guide: http://ruby-hacking-guide.github.io/
    Book on ruby internals: http://www.amazon.com/Ruby-Under-Microscope-Illustrated-Internals/dp/1593275277
    RubySpecs: http://rubyspec.org/

Further, incase you are stuck. you can post on the mailing-lists. someone will surely help you get started.

[stormbrew]

It's entirely possible that it's changed in the last few years, but at the very least what he said was once very true. There has traditionally been a very real and very painful language barrier to the ruby core team.

But, to be fair, it's a bit of a goose and gander kind of situation. People everywhere else in the world have to deal with that kind of situation all the time.

[steveklabnik]

It has, very significantly. There is still a 日本語-only mailing list (ruby-dev), but the English one has significantly more traffic (ruby-core). No decisions are made in ruby-dev that are not also discussed in ruby-core.

In addition, it's only that mailing list that's split; the bugtracker is in English, the help is all in English (with one or two 日本語 translations).

It's actually never been easier to contribute to Ruby.

[stormbrew]

That's good to hear.