Echt, The Netherlands
Elizabeth Mattijsen has been programming for a living since 1978 in various (mostly now defunct) programming languages before she started programming in Perl 4. In 1994 she started the first commercial web site development company in the Netherlands, using Perl 5 as the main programming language. From 2003 onwards, she was involved in the rapid growth of an online Hotel Reservation service. In 2012 she got more directly involved in the development of Rakudo Perl 6. From 2015 she has also been mostly responsible for the Perl 6 Weekly, a weekly blog post about developments in the Perl 6 world.
Authored Comments
I'm only aware of benchmarks comparing it to Perl 5. And depending on what you're doing, I would say that at the moment single thread Perl 6 is on par with Perl 5 in some situations, and 10x as slow as Perl 5 if you're using a lot of regexes. However, if you can parallelize your work with `race` or `hyper`, it usually is already a lot faster than Perl 5. I have no idea how the cards will be laid out 2-5 years. YMMV.
That MoarVM is **not** using reference counting, but instead a type of "mark and sweep", see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracing_garbage_collection