[rurban]

But basic knowledge of fast VMs would also help. Maybe get an engineer from a good school? E.g. a decent GC would help ruby a lot, i.e. Cheney Copying Collector with thread support. Ruby is used on devices with lots of RAM and big cache lines. Or optimized data structures (nan-tagging, better tagging) and slimmed down ops. I need 32bit per op plus 2 args. Check out how much more ops fit into your cache line then. The ruby hash table implementation also sucks. Write a good one. Study the literature. It's basic engineering, you don't need to be a genius, really.

And embrace types, either optional or inferenced. Optimize on type information.