I would say it is the second goal right now. Implementing JRuby and Mirah taught me a lot about features of Ruby that can map directly to Java/JVM, and I feel like this can be a very useful, functional subset of Ruby. Because this is a "compile the world" approach, things like evaluation probably will never be supported. But because it can generate the whole system, things like methods_missing, send, and respond_to? are all doable (and I just pushed m_m support a few hours ago). That opens up possibilities that are hard to achieve in typical statically typed languages without requiring any complicated dynamic dispatch system.
Honestly I feel like the biggest feature of both Mirah and RubyFlux are their ability to produce binaries that have no external dependencies. You only pay for what you use, and in both cases you,really just doing normal JVM calls under the covers. What Mirah achieves through static typing, RubyFlux achieves by generating all method names as stubs on a base class.
As others have pointed out...it is also just a fun experiment :-) But that is how both JRuby and Mirah started out too.
Honestly I feel like the biggest feature of both Mirah and RubyFlux are their ability to produce binaries that have no external dependencies. You only pay for what you use, and in both cases you,really just doing normal JVM calls under the covers. What Mirah achieves through static typing, RubyFlux achieves by generating all method names as stubs on a base class.
As others have pointed out...it is also just a fun experiment :-) But that is how both JRuby and Mirah started out too.