Mea culpa, and I agree. We have since switched to the Ruby Benchmark Suite and the unladen-swallow benchmarks as a baseline, so future numbers will at least reference those, and we will generally try to publish our branches and scripts (also for potential incorporation in upstream).

P.-S. — The white paper was in fact written shortly before the “computed-goto” patch appeared, and you are right that the dispatch techniques are very similar. Ruby 1.9 goes a bit further, however, by allowing a selection of different techniques at compile-time, the default of which (on x86-64 Linux) will use the opcode addresses directly as “bytecode” (i.e. direct-threaded vs. token-threaded code according to current Wikipedia terminology). Koichi Sasada can probably tell you more than I do about the difference in performance for Ruby code—if there is any.