Some exchanges use text based variable length message formats. String parsing is very much going on even though its the bane of HFT devs.

That's going away as exchanges upgrade their gateways.

Yes, and you are going to write your string parsing routines from scratch, no matter what language you use.

That's just plain terrible. But a good reminder that all the talk about nanoseconds is just that.

The thing is, everybody has to deal with the string parsing, so speeding up your string parsing does have value even if its slow in relation to non-string based exchanges.