Ruby is often compared to Smalltalk; and I’m sure a bunch of folks have always wondered when someone would implement Ruby either on top of Smalltalk (or even in a similar manner to Smalltalk, aka Rubinius).
Avi Bryant wondered as such, and seems to have gotten a job out of it in producing Maglev Ruby (it is a video).
Maglev seems to be the combination of a Ruby VM implemented along with a distributed, concurrent object system to support the needs of Ruby on Rails.
I heard Avi speak at OSCON 06, and he seems to be a nice fellow; I’ll be interested to see how this pans out.
Strangely, I haven’t heard Maglev mentioned by anyone I know, perhaps Ruby VMs aren’t interesting.