[ccashell]

If you're doing some sort of processing where you're calling an external script hundreds or thousands of times, you're probably doing it wrong. You should be writing it to get called once and process your input as it comes in.

That goes regardless of language. If you're calling an external "thing" thousands of times to process something, you're going to have issues with performance because the approach to processing the data is bad.

You can get away with it to a point by using only the most simple and basic of tools (cat/cut/tr/echo/grep/etc), but one of the common reasons that shell scripts get rewritten in Perl/Python/etc is to process data without making hundreds of thousands of calls to spawn external processes.