RPerl - Running Perl 5 Faster

Version 1.7 of the Perl 5 to C/C++ optimizing compiler, codenamed Tycho was released earlier this month. The issue RPerl tries to address is Perl's slow performance, sufficient for most cases, but prohibitive for the real time domain.

Perl trades speed for flexibility as it takes care of many things so the programmer won't have to, such as tying hashes (a term that refers to an intricate internal functionality) reference counting, automatic type conversions, closures, autoloading and much more.

full article on i-programmer