Without testing I'd have to say that I would not be surprised if Perl really was slower. Perl also tends to lose on complex regular regular expressions to CL-PPCRE for Perl 5.6 on up. And probably others.

However take the string ("foo " x 100)."fo" and try to match it to the regular expression /^(\s*foo\s*)*$/ and Perl 5.6 and up immediately figures out that it doesn't match, while the others won't make significant progress in the projected lifetime of the Sun.

The two issues are connected: to keep the disaster expression from being a disaster, Perl keeps track of extra information during a match to avoid redoing the same work again and again. On most regular expressions this tracking takes a lot of work and buys you little to nothing. However every so often you aren't left wondering why your program unexpectedly froze.