Which version of awk did you benchmark though? Mawk is pretty fast, for bread-and-butter awk stuff often significantly faster than perl. E.g.
perl -anE 'say($F[0]) if /error/' big.log >/dev/null 0.85s user 0.02s system 99% cpu 0.867 total
mawk '/error/ {print $1}' big.log > /dev/null 0.21s user 0.03s system 99% cpu 0.246 total
Not the OP but mawk wasn't really a thing in the 90s. Although the project was started in the mid 90s it only really saw a year of development before it languished unmaintained until 2009.
1991 to 1996 (when it was abandoned) isn't all that long for a programming language; particularly when there are already mature and widely deployed implementations out there for awk. Also bare in mind that in the 90s people weren't as disciplined about keeping their OS updated so mawk might never have made it onto peoples systems unless they built it themselves. Which is a hard sell if you've already got awk installed on the host given the point of running awk is a short term productivity gain (ie if you were going to the trouble to compile mawk then you might as well write your script in something lower level to begin with)
Plus if you're going to talk about older builds of mawk then you can't really ignore older versions of Perl as well (which was originally released in 1987). Otherwise you're not making a fair comparison.
I should add, I have absolutely nothing against mawk. It just wasn't something available on any of the POSIX systems I used in the 90s. tbh even now it's an optional install but at least it is an easier install than it was in the 90s.
