It's things like this and Corona (Lua) that make me thing that the people that are proclaiming that the emergence of mobile is going to lead to a native code "renaissance" are indulging in some wishful thinking.
Sure, there will always be some apps that will need to be coded close to the metal in C/C++ for maximum performance. But now we're seeing more and more that even on mobile devices we have enough power that we can afford to write most apps primarily or even entirely in "managed" languages like Lua, Java, and (apparently) Ruby.
Of course you need native code on the foundation. But it doesn't look to me like mobile is really going to change the equation that you only need one native programmer for every 100 higher level programmers.
I'm not optimistic about trying to generate good native code from a language like Ruby. You need much more control over memory layout, just for starters, to get real native speeds.
Sure, there will always be some apps that will need to be coded close to the metal in C/C++ for maximum performance. But now we're seeing more and more that even on mobile devices we have enough power that we can afford to write most apps primarily or even entirely in "managed" languages like Lua, Java, and (apparently) Ruby.