MacRuby literally dominates Ruby 1.9.1. On “average”, according to these limited tests the experimental branch of MacRuby appears to be roughly 3 times faster than Ruby 1.9.1 (YARV), and in some cases even faster than that. You should definitely find this impressive.

Apple’s sponsorship of the MacRuby project is – at least on the surface – very much like Google’s unladen-swallow Python branch.

This is a really big deal.

Update: “Sponsorship” may have been the wrong word to use, here. MacRuby is Apple’s project. They don’t just “sponsor” it.