The title of the article raises warning flags: 'Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast (but is slow in Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, ...)'.

The title makes a far broader claim than the body of the article. All the article shows is that Thomson NFA doesn't choke on the specific pathologies that Perl does. At a cursory glance, there is nothing to demonstrate the broader claim that regex matching is unconditionally "slow" in Perl, etc.