Render times are hovering around 1.8 seconds for a 300x300 pixel image. Considering that the image itself should be drawable in basically real-time, there's obviously a lot of room for improvement in the VM.
However, that 1.8 second figure is already down from over 8 seconds when I started on the raytracer project, so I'd say I've already accomplished some pretty decent speedups in the VM just from playing around with this.
I also haven't turned on JIT native code generation for any part of this (the JITter needs a lot of love) so there's a good chance I can speed it up another order of magnitude by executing native code instead of running everything on the VM.
All in all, not a bad bit of work, I must say. It's fun by itself to work on raytracing again, but I get to intermingle that with working on my own compiler and language, so I've been having a blast :-)