See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12487986/how-can-i-make-r... . The tl;dr of it is that MRI is atrocious at memory management. For political reasons we are stuck using Ruby in a situation like that; if we could easily, accurately compile that to Java and run it with with java -jar my_script.jar it'd be awesome.
Just for the sake of correctness, Charles Oliver Nutter is actually of one of the main developers of JRuby, a project created about 10 years ago but which has evolved a LOT since then. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JRuby#History
I am aware, but I haven't really had the time to get involved in testing it. I know we'd have to make some code changes because we depend on modules with native extensions in our script, but I don't know that they'd really be prohibitive.
Much easier would be: "Make this Java with one command to a cross-compiler".
