If I understand correctly, pcre = Perl Compatible Regular  Expressions. While that library attempts to be able to do most of what perl regex can do (or could do a while ago as it doesn&#x27;t seem to keep up with modern Perl versions), it doesn&#x27;t implement the entirety. Perl itself doesn&#x27;t use that library, but is an optimized engine built into perl that provides the basis that pcre is based off of.<p>It&#x27;s not surprising that the Perl is faster, as it is all in C, and has had lots of optimizations over a few decades.  I&#x27;ve had similar results between perl and things like grep, Ruby, python etc. Perl comes out on top!