> How many milliseconds does it take to parse YAML, XML, or any other file format for which a parser written in C is widely available?

YAML and XML may be slower than this, but Python 2.6's built-in 'json' module averages less than 20 milliseconds to parse a simple 1000-element "object"/dict on my system.

This isn't even the highest-performance JSON parser for Python, and parsing into less dynamic C or C++ datastructures would probably be somewhat faster still.