Would you be interested in the results of microbenchmarks or minibenchmarks rather than macro/$dayjob benchmarks like Solomon's?

Solomon's story might not be interesting to you, but it stands in sharp contrast to this recent speculation:

Prediction: Rakudo JVM will perform modestly better than Rakudo Parrot, mostly because rewriting NQP yet again can only improve it. It won't be the magical candy-vomiting unicorn panacaea that the Perl 6 marketing department wants to believe. It'll also take longer to reach stability than the marketing department wants to believe, and it'll use a lot more memory. A few microbenchmarks like tight loops of numeric code will look really good, but any program that exercises the parser (for example) will perform atrociously.

As it turns out, just 2 months later, Rakudo/JVM is already 40x faster than Rakudo/Parrot for Solomon's use case, it's already passing about the same number of spectests as Rakudo/Parrot, which puts it about 2 months ahead of the schedule suggested publicly in May, and it's clearly not performing atrociously at parsing (because that was Solomon's use case). I only recall one bit of news about memory, which was a minibenchmark, and it showed Rakudo/JVM using twice as much.

So, score one for the above commenter. (For now; I expect to revisit the issue of memory consumption on Rakudo VMs later this year.)

In 2009 I predicted Perl 6 would get to 6.0.0 and a generally robust state about a year from now. While I think that estimate has turned out to be a little optimistic (by a year? two? -- I did not anticipate how things would pan out with Parrot, nor the negativity toward Perl 6 being voiced by some leaders in the Perl community which I suspect has had an effect) I urge any monks who were ever interested in contributing to Perl 6 to come check it out again on the IRC channel #perl6 on freenode. Hope to see you there. :)