How could I have missed this?

Perl 7 has just been released!

Perl — not just for scripting any more!

With this release, Perl becomes not only the best scripting language available, but also the best application programming language. Incremental compilation technology transparently compiles every Perl7 script directly into memory as optimized native code, resulting in a system that combines the convenience of scripting languages with the power of compiled languages. (Odd how Java manages to achieve just the opposite...)

67 times faster than Perl5 — 50% faster than C!...