Moose speed and schedule

Hi all,

I read about Moose and love its ideas and philosophies (e.g. the CLOS  
origins). I'm starting to build out a framework for a new set of  
websites and was eager for a fresh, standard approach to creating  
Perl classes.

Unfortunately, the current object construction slowness will make  
this a non-starter. e.g. On my powerbook it takes 25ms of CPU time  
for Moose to construct a dead-simple object with a single accessor  
and no inheritance.

http://code2.0beta.co.uk/moose/svn/Moose/trunk/lib/Moose/Cookbook/ 
FAQ.pod mentions that immutable classes may eliminate, or at least  
vastly improve, object construction performance, and implies this  
will hopefully be done by the end of the year. Does this schedule  
still sound reasonable?

In the meantime, does anyone have a recommendation for an alternate  
class framework I can use that will make the eventual jump to Moose  
as painless as possible?

Thanks for any information, and thanks for working on this very  
intriguing module!

Best,
Jon