Thanks for running the benchmarks :)

That pretty much reflects what I've thought for a while. Despite arguments to the contrary.

There is a substantial penalty to unicode support for many string operations, even when the strings involved do not, have not and could not contain unicode.

I wish that it was possible to reliably, manually 'turn off' all unicode processing and conditional testing using a progma (say no utf8; or use bytes;) and recover the 5.6.x performance.