To scratch a quick interesting thought that came into my head I just had a look at Cardinal, which is a Ruby implementation running on the Parrot VM - https://github.com/parrot/cardinal

So downloaded & built Cardinal (which went seamlessly however I did have Parrot already installed) then I did same benchmarks alongside ruby1.8 here:

  $ time ruby -e "puts 'hello world'"
  hello world
  
  real	0m0.130s
  user	0m0.049s
  sys	0m0.071s

  $ time parrot-cardinal -e "puts 'hello world'"
  hello world

  real	0m0.057s
  user	0m0.037s
  sys	0m0.019s

Very interesting because I thought Cardinal was supposed to be slow!

I think more diverse benchmarks are required. And when time permitting I might add Topaz & ruby1.9 into the mix.