Why do std::string operations perform poorly?

Question

I made a test to compare string operations in several languages for choosing a language for the server-side application. The results seemed normal until I finally tried C++,

Answer 1

The idiomatic C++ solution would be:

#include 
#include 
#include 

int main()
{
    const int limit = 102 * 1024;
    std::string s;
    s.reserve(limit);

    const std::string pattern("ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ");

    for (int i = 0; i < limit; ++i) {
        s += 'X';
        if (std::search(s.begin(), s.end(), pattern.begin(), pattern.end()) != s.end())
            std::cout << "Omg Wtf found!";
    }
    std::cout << "X's length = " << s.size();
    return 0;
}

I could speed this up considerably by putting the string on the stack, and using memmem -- but there seems to be no need. Running on my machine, this is over 10x the speed of the python solution already..

[On my laptop]

time ./test X's length = 104448 real 0m2.055s user 0m2.049s sys 0m0.001s