Perl 6 will have eval. Some of the things you can do with regexes will cause some speed degradations--there's nothing much for it. If enabled, some functionality will also be conditionally optimized, such that if a feature isn't known to be needed at compile time, it'll be optimized away and not available to evals later.

Yes, you can turn this behaviour off, in which case the slower way will be used, which is fine. (As it's what you asked for) Which will be the default way is up to Larry.