This is also the P6 problem.

Many years ago there was a perl compiler...

... but it never worked very well. Certainly it didn't save memory and it rarely saved much startup time.

Perl still didn't address any real problems...

I think there's something like the Expression Problem in programming language design. How do you allow people to solve new problems and explore new patterns and paradigms in a language without encouraging them to create a series of incompatible forks (Tcl, Lisp, Common Lisp, Forth, Smalltalk, heavily macroed or otherwise preprocessed C or C++), limiting the scope of your language to small or relatively isolated projects (Lua), bringing ideas into the core library where they slowly bitrot (Python, Perl), or facing a dramatic rewrite (Perl, PHP)?

For better or worse, Perl's answer in the past few years has been to prototype new ideas on the CPAN, let the community use them and reimplement them and compete, and eventually enable them with the minimal core support possible. The strategy is decent, but it's not fast and it relies on the ability to find people willing and able to do this work in the Perl core.