I'd hoped that. I'd heard enough people claiming otherwise that I guessed that perhaps Perl wasn't that smart.

I also noticed that none of the benchmarking code in this thread was making a straight substitution of /.../o with $qr between the cases. So I picked the code that had the most similar test cases and added one, got results even better than I expected, quadruple checked things because "better than expected benchmarks" almost always means "mistake made".

Adding another case for /$qr/, I get it being nearly identical to my $_ =~ $qr case (which is faster than /.../o, perhaps just because the qr/.../ part is done outside the scope of the benchmarking; but "fixing" that would be more work than I care to invest at this point).

So I suspect that diotalevi is correct in both that =~ /$qr/ and =~ $qr produce identical code and that the benchmark results showing qr// to be slower than //o have to do with other code differences between the cases and/or the order that operations get run (or chance).

Thanks, diotalevi.