Should be: Goodnight, Perl 6.

I think the point being made was not about the quality of the language so much as the implementation. The Perl 5 implementation is old technology: it doesn't have dynamic native code compilation, or even a real garbage collector, as you noted. But the upside of that is that it is mature and, for what it does, pretty fast. A complex algorithm implemented in Perl will never run as fast as Javascript with the latest engines, but programs that do a small amount of processing around builtin C routines (such as the regexp engine) have decent performance and not excessive memory usage. The Unicode support is nowadays very good too. Rakudo being something new hasn't been optimized to the same extent.