Raku is a significantly higher level language than most languages. Which tends to lead to slowness. Really it's faster in many places than it has any right to.

Raku is a significantly higher level language than most languages. Which tends to lead to slowness. Really it's faster in many places than it has any right to. @a[1]; Is just shorthand for a subroutine call. postcircumfix:< [ ] >( @a, 1 ); Which ends up calling a method. @a.AT-POS( 1 ); Actually that is also a simplification as AT-POS is probably a multi method. Not to mention inheritance. There is even a level under that, NQP. (simplified example below) my $reified := nqp::getattr(@a, List, '$!reified'); my $result := nqp::atpos($reified, $pos); All of those levels of indirection have a cost associated with them. --- It just Rakudo on MoarVM has a bunch of optimizations to remove the needed complexity at some point. Either during compilation, or after it's been running for a while. So with those optimizations it can sometimes beat other higher level languages. (For some specific uses it may even sometimes meet or exceed the speed of low level languages like C/C++. Mainly for algorithmic reasons.) More optimizations would always be nice though.