TFA only talks about gawk, though, making this comparison meaningless ie. you can't benchmark languages but only language implementations. Same goes for other programming languages ofc unless those have only a single implementation.
mawk is an order of magnitude faster than gawk, and gawk isn't even the default on many Linuxen.
> TFA only talks about gawk, though, making this comparison meaningless
Not exactly! To quote from TFA (I'm the author):
> Another “optimization” is to run it using mawk, a faster AWK interpreter than gawk. In this case it’s about 1.7 times as fast as gawk -b. I’m using mawk in the benchmarks for the optimized version.
mawk is an order of magnitude faster than gawk, and gawk isn't even the default on many Linuxen.