There's pretty wide variety in the performance of regular expressions between different languages, and efficient implementations will often recognize when your

There's pretty wide variety in the performance of regular expressions between different languages, and efficient implementations will often recognize when your regular expression has a literal suffix/prefix, and optimize accordingly. That doesn't help you if you're stuck using a library that doesn't perform those optimizations, but it means you need to be careful about importing your assumptions about regex performance from one language to another. See also: https://github.com/burntSushi/rebar https://github.com/burntSushi/rebar