Most of the well-know "unix-style" command-line tools, such as grep, sort, etc. actually have very high performance. Their relatively constrained use cases allo

Most of the well-know "unix-style" command-line tools, such as grep, sort, etc. actually have very high performance. Their relatively constrained use cases allow the authors to implement decent algorithms and optimizations (e.g. sort uses merge sort, grep uses all kinds of optimizations: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-August/019310.html http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-Augu...) In contrast, when you're building a custom pipeline in a high-level language, you're optimizing for simple solutions and are not likely to get better performance unless you hit an edge case where the standard tools do really poorly.