It is definitely slower than Perl5 but I don't see it that slow, even on a PowerPC G4:

    ~/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
[download]

--
John.