It's probably worth mentioning that the regex-dna test time is kind of incorrect and provides an inaccurate view of what's happening.

Java-8 is using java.util.regex which is written in Java, PHP is passing the regex requests to it's own regex process which is actually a C package and performs a lot faster.

What we're actually comparing here is:

time(java.util.regex) > time(php compilation + c regex package)

> Java-8 is using java.util.regex <

No, the fastest Java program shown does not use java.util.regex

The fastest Java program shown uses com.basistech.tclre

> a C package and performs a lot faster <

You're welcome to contribute a Java program that uses the PCRE library --

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/play.html

PHP's execution performance is highly dependent on whether you are piggybacking the C implementations, or pure-PHP ones. That said, this is still a correct benchmark, if your use case involves a lot of regex.