Ruby inventor Matz working on native compiler with AI help

Yukihiro Matsumoto - better known as Matz - is building Spinel, a native compiler for Ruby, with help from Anthropic's Claude Code. Spinel, which is on GitHub under the MIT license, works by parsing Ruby code into AST (abstract syntax tree) files, then converting it to C code for compilation by a standard C compiler. In Matz’s tests, Spinel-compiled code runs approximately 11.6 times faster than MiniRuby - a stripped-down Ruby build - using the in-development Roby 4.1.0.