Lizormato and some other folks have put in hundreds of performance fixes...I think these things just take time. The language might have been in development and design since the 90's, but it only just got to 1.0 or a "stable release" in 2017 I think. I'm surprised Larry Wall hasn't written a Perl6 book yet. Plenty of other authors have, but I was really looking forward to something from him or Damien Conway.