~/tmp/rakudo$ time ./perl6 -e 'say "Hello, World"' Hello, World real 0m2.923s user 0m2.274s sys 0m0.244s And for comparison, here is perl 5.8.8 on the same machine: ~/tmp/rakudo$ time perl -le 'print "Hello, World"' Hello, World real 0m0.012s user 0m0.003s sys 0m0.008s