""" We write a lot of Python here at Safari, in fact it’s our most widely-used language. Because it’s a very high-level language, it was likely it would satisfy my second requirement. But my experience with writing log parsers in Python before–even when using tricks like lazy evaluation–led me to suspect that it would not do so well in satisfying the first requirement. """

How can one say one parse is high performance and another isn't if no comparison is made? e.g. the author could use pylogsparser and benchmark it:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pylogsparser/0.8

Then we can get an idea of whether the project set out to meet its goal of being quicker than python.

In any event, I'd be interested to see how luajit-lpeg compares to their haskell impl. It even has a nice online test tool:

http://lpeg.trink.com/share/syslog