Thought from THE FUTURE: MetaCPAN (the best and now, only, way to look up and/or search for things on CPAN) uses ElasticSearch (written in Java) for text-searching - in other words, use the best tool for the job.

Regarding PDL, I recently cribbed some code in order to add PDL support STL ("Stereolithograpy", a lingua franca format for 3D printing in 2022). When I switched from a Perl loop reading a chunk of bytes then using unpack, to making an ndarray where it sliced the relevant parts of each chunk out and treated those as single-precision data, the data-processing more than doubled in speed. In other words, PDL's data-processing is (not surprisingly) faster than an interpreted language's processing, even using the optimised unpack functionality.