Damn, busted. Elixir was the first thing that popped into my head on seeing this title. It looks almost like a Ruby port to the Erlang VM.
That said, good writeup, even for a non-Rubyist, enjoyed seeing the process.
One thing that stuck out is how control flow via if/then/else is faster than via case (for more than 2 options) in Ruby. I always assumed the opposite, for any language.
There's an older (but still interesting) post about case in Ruby here[1] and another here[2] with some extra insight into the MRI implementation. Having learned Ruby before most of the other stuff I play with these days, I always second-guess myself when using a switch/case construct in my code.
