Note that a Perl regex is compiled into a tree of regnodes while the rest of the Perl code is compiled into a tree of opcodes.

So there are two different kinds of non-"byte-code"s here. The original inspiration of this thread was talking about regnodes while you've linked to a discussion about Perl opcodes.

The regnodes and opcodes are quite similar, so the impressions people have gotten from this minor misdirection are likely rather accurate. (:

I've heard that Perl is relatively slow at dispatching opcodes and relatively fast at dispatching regnodes such that formulating problems as a regex can be quite a bit faster than formulating them as Perl code. Not that this is usually an easy proposition.