"Fair" comparisons of the sort you're talking about are not useful when choosing a language. If I'm choosing a language for an application, I don't care if it's unfair that one is much faster than the other because it has a JIT compiler instead of an interpreter - I only care which one is the most suitable.

For what it's worth, JRuby performs a tiny bit better.

I think Ruby in general is less amenable to analysis/compilation than Lua is, so even a JITed Ruby might not do as well as Lua.

That's like saying "Of course, get a non-sucky version of ruby going, then you can make a fair comparison."

Unlike say...JRuby?

JRuby is not a JIT for Ruby, and it doesn't compile Ruby to Java bytecode. It's a Ruby interpreter, written in Java.

Recent work in JRuby does exactly that. It'll JIT your code, and you an even pre-compile if you want.

(AFAIK, just seen references to all this).

Cool! Looks like it's been around for over a year:

http://wiki.jruby.org/wiki/JRuby_Compiler