From: Caleb Clausen <vikkous@...>
Date: 2006-07-29T23:52:19+09:00
Subject: Re: Slow regular expressions

On 7/29/06, Jeremy Henty <jeremy@chaos.org.uk> wrote:
> Yow!  Calling String#match is 2-3 times as slow!  Why is that?  The
> overhead of calling the method?

I was curious about this too.
It looks like it's the effort of computing a MatchData that takes all
the extra time. This snippet is just as slow as using #match:

  bm.report '=~ literal + $~' do
    N.times do string =~ /a (.) c\s. e/ ; $~ end
  end