[oscardssmith]

Currently Julia will probably lose to C++ here due to some GC quirks and less well optimized strings. That said, both of these issues are being worked on, and I would expect fairly major progress by 1.8. (some of this work is already done. Specifically, as of 2 days ago memory alignment of strings has changed to save 8 bytes for most strings). Future improvements will likely include some form of small string optimization to prevent them from being heap allocated, and making julia's GC more efficient for highly threaded code.