I am fairly ignorant of Ragel, but to my understanding Ragel is better for assuring correctness rather than performance. I don't think Ragel makes any claims re

I am fairly ignorant of Ragel, but to my understanding Ragel is better for assuring correctness rather than performance. I don't think Ragel makes any claims regarding performance. I could see a specially written parser outperforming it, just like hand written assembly can still sometimes outperform a compiler. I agree that it's more likely to have bugs, though.