What is the state of Ruby as a compiled language?

Ruby has been around for a while now so I was wondering if there was any work being done on a compiler for it? I know that compiler design is hindered by things like Eval() so I would not expect implementations to be 100 percent accurate? My own searches have turned开发者_Go百科 up sparse results.

MacRuby offers Ahead-of-Time Compilation as of v0.5. It uses LLVM to compile binaries that will run on the Objective-C runtime.

Rubinius is a JIT compiler for Ruby. A pure compiler will never exist for Ruby because the language is far too dynamic for a static compiler to work. Whatever it did internally would be incredibly ugly and would evolve towards a JIT as they tried to optimize it anyway.

There's Mirah, for compiling Ruby code into Java bytecode:

http://www.mirah.org/

I believe you could obfuscate your code this way.