I agree with your comment about structured data. Parsing everything from (unstructured) text is pretty backwards, it's more work and very error-prone. But call

I agree with your comment about structured data. Parsing everything from (unstructured) text is pretty backwards, it's more work and very error-prone. But calling bash slow is kind of strange. What are you trying to do in a shell, that you can call it slow? A shell simply parses commands and dispatches them. For example, if you grep a 100GB file and it takes a long time the shell is not the bottleneck.