Warnings enabled, the 32k problem should have manifested itself:

Complex regular subexpression recursion limit (32766) exceeded
To work around this problem (a warning remains), one may double the repeat quantifiers, e.g.: 
my $braces = qr/(?<braces> { (?: (?: [^{}] | (?&braces) )*+ )* } )/x;

[download]

perlre has the following example on handling nested parens: 

my $parens = qr/(\((?:[^()]++|(?-1))*+\))/;
if (/foo $parens \s+ \+ \s+ bar $parens/x) {
   # do something here...
}

[download]

In reply to Re^2: Perl regex limitations (32k) by oiskuu
in thread Perl regex limitations by jonneve

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