[peterwwillis]

Perl is not necessarily faster than C at all string manipulation, but it does have some handy features that makes short work of more complicated functionality. See here: http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/06/27/ctoperl.html

Sometimes Perl does things more uniformly across different systems than would be done on a single system with a different language like C. For example, this is Perl's malloc implementation: http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/blob/7742aa6637b99424497e...

Depending on what you are doing, Perl may have a more efficient way of tackling the problem. This isn't to say you couldn't do it in that exact same way in a different language and find a faster result; it's just that Perl already does things efficiently, so you don't have to spend time tuning algorithms.