&gt; Perl devs don&#x27;t think twice about shelling out to an external binary<p>No, most of them do. Perl ecosystem has a killer feature called cpantesters, that allows everyone to see which modules work on which systems out of the box. You should always check cpantesters matrix before choosing a particular dependency.<p>&gt; Even if regexs are not needed<p>They got overly complicated over the years, but they are needed. They are DSLs to make things easier when working with strings. I.e. so you wouldn&#x27;t have to write 20 lines of hard to grasp code with bytes.Index(), bytes.HasSuffix(), bytes.TrimRight(), etc., like people do in Go, but a single nice regexp and therefore reduce your chances to make a mistake in that code.