Object allocations really are a big deal with Ruby. My Ruby compiler project has been really slow moving again over the last year, but as far as I can tell the current main hurdle is a basic garbage collector, as even adding various object caching, I actually exhaust the 2GB heap (the compiler was started when i386 was a reasonable initial architecture choice...)...<p>Granted that's worse that it'd be for MRI, as it includes allocating actual objects even for Fixnum and Symbol (MRI uses tagged values for both and just pretend they're "real" objects), though I added caching for both that cut hundred of thousands of allocations..