> Shopify isn’t hiring people to contribute to MySQL or Redis internals

You are not wrong, but the main reason is that contrary to Ruby, MySQL and Redis are used by a lot of huge companies and are themselves owned by companies with full time people on it.

In comparison Ruby is still mostly a volunteer ran project that receive little funding and effort relative to its importance.

As for why trying to make Ruby faster at all in the first place. It's not because it was too slow, it's mostly just that at our scale, the engineering time spent on optimizing the runtime pretty much pays for itself.

But that's nothing specific to Ruby, in most very large software companies you will find similar efforts. e.g. I remember Twitter had a team working on the JVM, etc.

The bizarre part here is that anyone who paint themselves into a corner with ruby, then decide that they need to implement an entire new fancy VM instead of just find targeted bottlenecks and rewriting them in C++. They writing complicated native programs to make a VM that is only 15% faster when they could rewrite specific sections that are slow and speed those up by 200x or more.