[dfox]

Perl5 is not too meaningful for such performance comparisons, because on one hand it's regex implementation is very optimized while on other hand performance of Perl5 on "normal" procedural code is horrible (eg. Perl5 is about an order of magnitude slower on Gabriel's Takeuchi function benchmark than CPython).

[nicoburns]

This result generalises to most interpreted languages though. PHP, python, javascript, etc all have highly optimised regex engines, and regexs can consequently be a good optimisation technique when using those languages.