Erlang downsides?

[James Hague]

On 8/31/06, Christian S <chsu79@REDACTED> wrote:
> > > * Regular expression matching (there's a module, but watch Perl beat
> > > it by a factor of 100).
> >
> > What language doesn't perl beat at regex?
>
> As far as I know perl's regexps are fast because C was used to
> implement them. If we would see an implementation of perl in perl I
> doubt its regexps would spank.

Exactly.  And other dynamic languages--including Ruby and
Python--simply link to the standard Perl regular expression library.
In Erlang regular expression are slow because they're implemented
entirely in high-level Erlang (which is simultaneously cool and slow).