[artagnon]

It's nice to dream up a language with the perfect semantics; in reality, all programming languages make compromises because they are limited by current compiler technology. Ruby is on one extreme end of the spectrum, making little compromises on beauty, but we all know how slow it is.

Go is on the other end of the spectrum; they have tuned their syntax to be fast to parse, and have stuck to implementing existing compiler technology. If your semantics are very far removed from how computers work, you need a very advanced compiler like GHC.

It sounds like Perl6 is somewhat centrist in its approach, and has innovated quite a bit; I think it will be possible to almost match Perl5's speed with reasonable effort. The interpreter might do well on small examples, but the VM will dominate in very large ones. Many compilers are tiered in that they use an interpreter for cold code, and spend the effort to generate code and JIT hot code.