How does Ruby balance performance vs flexibility in its VM design?

Ruby prioritizes dynamic flexibility over strict performance, using caching and JIT to recover speed.

Ruby VM is designed for dynamic features: open classes, monkey patching, and metaprogramming. This flexibility increases runtime overhead due to frequent invalidations and dynamic dispatch. To compensate, CRuby uses inline caching, method versioning, GC optimizations, and JIT compilation (YJIT) to regain performance in hot paths.