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.

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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.