Wow. There needs to be a cheat sheet for this because every time it comes up I find mistakes, in this case my own. So my previous discovery that capturing parens cause the entire string to be copied is mostly not true. I assume the copy is required for s/// and s///g. Testing shows that otherwise the copy only happens for m// on modern perls (the 'scalar context' part doesn't appear to matter in my current testing) and doesn't even happen then with 5.6.

It is nice that I can stop fearing the performance impact of capturing parens when doing the usual scalar-context m/.../gc of a parser. Thanks!