That depends on what you are doing. Which test did you run? Around 10 years ago I rewrote markdown.pl in awk and it was almost 20 times faster. The speedup cam

That depends on what you are doing. Which test did you run? Around 10 years ago I rewrote markdown.pl in awk and it was almost 20 times faster. The speedup came from both a much faster startup time and a much faster (albeit simpler) regexp implementation.