A follow up note to Patrick's Rakudo performance slideshow. The Rakudo team has only recently begun optimizing the compiler. So, although loops are something like 30x faster than they were 18 months ago, and Perl 6 is now considered fast enough that some folk have chosen to use it in commercial production settings, loops are still about 30x slower than Perl 5. Fortunately, it's been speeding up a lot for many months now and several big jumps are expected over the next year.