Realistic Rails apps will not work yet, but there is fast progress in this area, we started this year with a minimal webserver and now got a simple blog app working with a PostgreSQL adapter.
Or at least, I doubt it. You're free to predict whatever you like.
At the very least, I don't think any amb implementations are making their way to jruby any time soon. Although that's not an issue with any real-world code.
This blog post and video explain where a lot of the big speedups come from.
http://chrisseaton.com/rubytruffle/deoptimizing/
I wrote my PhD about this topic, so there is even a whole thesis if you really want to get the details on how it works.
I wish it could be summarised in a comment, but it's actually not "that simple," so I recommend you read Chris Seaton's posts about GraalVM and JRuby+Truffle which has some excellent high-level explanations [of why Graal is amazing]. :)
It kinda shows how bad Ruby's performance is compared to most other languages.
The goal of optcarrot is explicitly not to be the "practical"or "the fastest NES emulator".
From https://github.com/mame/optcarrot > NOTE: We do not aim to create a practical NES emulator. There have been already many great emulators available. We recommend you use another emulator if you just want to play a game.
JRuby+Truffle's performance is not bad compared to other languages: https://github.com/smarr/are-we-fast-yet#current-status
It makes use of this video format, which seems almost like a video equivalent of the PNM image format: https://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=YUV4MPEG2
I wish there was something similar that used RGB though.