PyPy 1.6 was released today, and in the discussion on Hacker News is a great compare and contrast on PyPy and Rubinius: Rubinius and PyPy take quite different approaches to solving the same general problem. It's inaccurate to analogize them. Rubinius specifies a bytecode (see http://rubini.us/doc/en/virtual-machine/instructions/) and implements a VM that executes this bytecode. The VM is written