WTF.... I just looked a bit closer at this, and for starters the graphs are for startup times compared to JRuby, and isn labelled with any values. They say nothing about the performance of the actual code.

Furthermore, it appears to be a commercial product, yet searching for it reveals only a handful of link to their own site, and hardly no mentions elsewhere and the examples/docs are pitiful at best.

Looking quite shady to me.

Hi, thanks for your frank comments.

the graphs are for startup times compared to JRuby

The first graph compares startup times. The second graph compares execution times. This has now been clarified on the site.

the examples/docs are pitiful at best

Working on it! What would you like the docs to address specifically?

Looking quite shady to me

I'm sorry you feel that way. Would you like a free evaluation license?

That's interesting, but if you start type annotating the code, then you lose a large part of what makes Ruby attractive to a lot of people.

people write annotations already anyway, in the comments or documentation: see the method signatures at http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.0/Object.html

Yes, take a look at those method signatures. They are imprecise and incomplete. And that is for MRI itself. Very few Ruby projects has documentation anywhere near what MRI does, whether separate or in the comments.

But even if it did: Rubyists are far more likely to be tolerant about documenting type information in optional comments than including them in the code.

I think there's room for experimenting with Ruby's typing, but I also think the most that project can hope to achieve would be extensions that could see some limited use in the odd little piece of performance critical code. It's best hope of success, actually, would be that JRuby and other alternative implementations grow more popular and make it harder for people to rely on C-extensions.