To be fair, the benchmarks game PHP script does quite more work that just matching a regexp, like forking into multiple interpreters (which can't be that fast)

To be fair, the benchmarks game PHP script does quite more work that just matching a regexp, like forking into multiple interpreters (which can't be that fast) and communicating through a message queue. So any speed difference between Rust's and PCRE/PHP gets lost among the noise.