I may be wrong, but I have the feeling that we are getting really near this time to have a real Perl 6, possibly not yet really full-fledged, but pretty close, the performance improvement has been quite massive over the last year, Perl 6 seems to be able to use existing Perl 5 modules (including XS or Inline C modules, it seems).

It seems to me that that Perl 6 development is really getting into another dimension this time. What I have used so far in my Perl 6 experiments was still not entirely satisfactory, but there has been a very clear improvement. I haven't made any detailed study, but it seems to me that programs are running at almost satisfactory speed (compared to Perl 5), just compiling is still quite slow. If my impression is right, I would not care too much, a few seconds lost on compilation time don't matter for me when I work on GB-long files.