I am much less worried about speed and more concerned with what a pain it is to write test modules with the current infrastructure due to its monolithic design.

In my naive world view, tests should emit TAP, test runners should manage test processes and collect the TAP, and test frameworks should tell the runners what to run and process the TAP and produce reports.

To that end I have been working on a TAP::Producer class for a while. Feel free to check it out and see if it serves your needs https://github.com/daotoad/TAP-Producer