Anonymous Monk,

Thank you for your feedback. I think, in general, you are repeating the general wisdom, and the general wisdom is right, in general.

Basically what we're probably looking at right now is carefully and systematically re-writing much of Perl 5. LLVM will probably be a good target backend, and will also require significant upgrading to handle Perl semantics in an optimized fashion.

For example, here's a copy of Reini's most recent ideas on optimization options:
https://gist.github.com/3740313

Thanks,
~ Will