in reply to Rakudo on PowerPC Mac...

I concur with the others: something is seriously broken with your build of Rakudo.

Does it still take so long if you try parrot_install/bin/parrot perl6.pbc -e 'say "hello"', instead of using the perl6 executable? Did you try both one-liner (-e) and a script?

If you look at a CPU monitor, is the CPU actually 100% busy while running the script?

Perl 6 - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.