One reason to put things in universal.c is it allows you to use these functions in miniperl. If they are used by things that are run by miniperl or they are used to test perl then they need to be available early. Another reason is that functions are used to implement parts of perls internals, and therefore need to be around. An example is some of the re:: routines that are used to implement named captures. They need to be usable without loading the re dll, which also contains a full debugging enabled version of the regex engine.
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$world=~s/war/peace/g