Yeah, it appears that in the original benchmark an off the shelf C parser outperformed an off the shelf Ruby parser. Then they wrote their own parser in Ruby, w

Yeah, it appears that in the original benchmark an off the shelf C parser outperformed an off the shelf Ruby parser. Then they wrote their own parser in Ruby, which was faster. But for a fair comparison, you should also write the same parser in C and compare it to that. It's possible that writing it in Ruby is preferable if it avoids FFI overhead and can do more aggressive inlining. But this doesn't seem like an apples to apples comparison.