Moar has come light-years over the past 12 months. It very well might be! Give it another try.

I recall a few months ago that a hand full of the benchmarks on JVM were actually running faster than Perl 5.latest, though most were slower.

Perl 6 is far, far more optimizable than Perl 5, and also most similar languages. The long-term focus on correct first is finally paying off.