There's a lot that *could* be done. It's a complete mess at the moment and needs an overhaul - it affects lots of things, not just this issue, e.g. unnecessary slowness using a regex object for a match compared with a literal pattern. Really, the capture state needs splitting off into a separate data structure from the main regex data structure, so that it can be swapped in and out easily, and so a qr// object can be used in multiple places without internally having to clone the whole thing each time.

It's on my very long list of things to be do, but I'm not likely to do it any time soon.

Dave.