Glad to hear that. :-) The 10.2 megs is because we statically link everything (including a Perl 5 runtime in it), which simplified development a lot.

Pugs will remain slower that Perl 5 on average, as long as we're still focusing on implementing missing features -- that's to say, until 6.2831.0 or so. However, if it's unbearably slow for your production tasks in some given area, please let us know on #perl6 or perl6-compiler, and we can almost always optimize that part first.

Thanks again for trying out Pugs... A commit bit is on its way to you. :)