Is Ruby interpreted or compiled?

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Most of the people who worked on Ruby assumed that it was an interpreted language like PHP or Javascript – in other words, that Ruby read in, parsed and executed your code all at runtime, at the moment your program was run. This seemed especially obvious since the default and most popular implementation of Ruby is called “MRI,” short for “Matz’s Ruby Interpreter.” I always thought it was necessary to use an interpreter to make all of the dynamic features of the language possible.

However, it turns out that both JRuby and Rubinius, two other popular implementations of Ruby, support using a compiler the same way you would with a statically typed language like C or Java. Both JRuby and Rubinius first compile your Ruby code to byte code, and later execute it.    More...