After 15 years of development, perl 6 will be officially launched as production ready software in 2015.
https://fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/get_ready_to_party/
Who knows, 2015 may also be the year of the linux desktop, unless HURD is also ready for prime time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 10 2014, @10:17AM
And Facebook has been making faster versions of PHP. So I don't think speeding up perl is impossible. Unlikely of course.