<p><pre><code>    &gt; I&#x27;d be interested to see what features there are that
    &gt; make the system slower in general, even when they
    &gt; aren&#x27;t being used. I did a lot of work in my PhD on
    &gt; making odd features not affect the performance of
    &gt; Ruby code when they aren&#x27;t being used.
</code></pre>
I suspect you would be warmly welcomed, and meet many interesting people, in the Perl6 IRC channel, especially if you lead to a link to your PhD.