the benchmark doesn't run for me it simply dies

You’re probably running a 32-bit version of Perl. I did mention that my testing was confined to 64-bit versions, but I should have emphasised this as a requirement. Sorry.

Also you're using qr (compile regex) the stupid way

Thanks for the link, but I don’t understand what you’re getting at. What would the clever way be?

compile once and cache as intended? That is  our $re; $re ||= qr...;

im afk atm ; you might gain some insight about when regex are compiled using

re  use re 'debug';