Reading through the responses to this comment, the upshot w.r.t regex performance is that it's a significant advantage to have native regex support in a languag

Reading through the responses to this comment, the upshot w.r.t regex performance is that it's a significant advantage to have native regex support in a language. Because C doesn't the regex ultimately has to be translated into C at parse time, whereas with Javascript the regex is converted to machinecode at run time. This is similar to the advantage of abstraction layers in general, although there's a cost if you create abstraction layers for things no-one much cares about.