[Dunbar]

The one thing I've learned in the years I've worked with Perl is to never underestimate the ability of the Perl community to achieve the incredible.

To compare the performance of the mature, optimized Perl 5 core to the freshly baked, feature rich Perl 6 is shortsighted in the extreme.

The Perl 5 runtime is hard to extend, meaning that using the modern additions to the language (notably Moose), comes with a significant start up penalty. This can not be easily overcome.

Perl 6 has a Grammar, Perl 5 only has an implementation (only perl5 can parse Perl5). There is a lot of opportunity for making Perl 6 nice and fast, certainly fast enough for the larger complex applications it is designed to support.

Perl 6 is not trying to compete with Perl 5 on one line throw away scripts. Not yet anyway.