wow, that is insane. You picked an awesome example. We're only talking about on the order of a million bytes in your example, so 2 minutes to process on the o

wow, that is insane. You picked an awesome example. We're only talking about on the order of a million bytes in your example, so 2 minutes to process on the order of 1 megabyte with a regex is just insane. If you applied it to 1 gigabyte of files that would be an even 2 days vs Perl 5 @ 16 minutes.[1] Sixteen minutes isn't enough to rewrite it in C, so Perl 5 is "fast enough". You can go get a coffee or think about the next thing you want to do with the data, or write the next part of your processing. But two days is prohibitive: it breaks your workflow. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=2+minutes+49+seconds*+1024 https://www.google.com/search?q=2+minutes+49+seconds*+1024 https://www.google.com/search?q=0.94+seconds+*+1024 https://www.google.com/search?q=0.94+seconds+*+1024