Rather than argue back and forth about which regex implementation is better here, I'd simply note the absence of multicore numbers for V8 and that the crappy Tc

Rather than argue back and forth about which regex implementation is better here, I'd simply note the absence of multicore numbers for V8 and that the crappy Tcl library beats single-threaded Javascript when run multicore. It would be interesting, however, to compare the performance here to that of the "grep" command on the same expressions. I'd be surprised at anything short of a total smackdown of Javascript V8. I would expect an even bigger smackdown if one invoked GPUs: http://bkase.github.io/CUDA-grep/finalreport.html http://bkase.github.io/CUDA-grep/finalreport.html Even more interesting would be an OpenCL implementation that did exactly what V8 is doing to the regexes (Why? Because it can). And total aside, this is why I don't participate in TopCoder competitions - they never let you have any real fun.