First of all, this is really comparison of regexp packages. PCRE (am I correct that it's used in perl?) written in C vs re2 written in Go.<p>On related topic, in this case utf8 is not needed so switching to []byte oriented api is good idea (and as an added benefit - slices are cheaper to copy then strings) - see comparison <a href="https://gist.github.com/tumdum/83581aee2693a60f5133" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/tumdum/83581aee2693a60f5133</a>