If you're interested in ruby and the upcoming ruby 2.5 release on Dec/25th - may I highlight the Ruby Advent Calendar 2017 [1] incl. Ruby 2.5 news and highlights 25 ruby libraries / gems. Happy holidays / christmas and hacking w/ ruby.
[1]: https://planetruby.github.io/advent2017
Does optimizing Ruby have diminishing returns? It doesn't have a JIT and it's all late method lookups, seems like that would be a much higher performance win, to remove the runtime metaprogrammed nightmare soup. I also wonder if that's even compatible with the language at all.