Probably not, but in some cases sed and AWK might be faster. I am a big fan of AWK. It is limited in some ways that make it impractical to use for really serious programs, but it is very expressive. Look at [1, 2].
EDIT to manage expectations: the article doesn't explain why, it just provides benchmarks and one commenter made a suggestion about character handling. More insight still welcome :)
The case where I saw a 7x speedup was doing many-times-per-line, fixed-string search/replace on a file consisting of very long lines (an SQL dump where some lines had >1m characters). Perl was IO-bound (so presumably would've been even faster if I'd had better disks), while sed was CPU-bound at a pretty low fraction of the possible IO performance.
For the really complex stuff, there's rejit[0]. I wonder if LuaJIT would work; these tools also need IO tricks to be fast.