Hi,
as the importance of regular expressions is (still) growing, more efforts put on speeding up pattern matching performance. Many regexp engines employ just-in-time compliation techniques today, like YARR of WebKit or Irregexp from Google in V8. This is a straightforward feature for JavaScript engines, since they use JIT engines for other purposes as well. Have you ever considered adding JIT support for PCRE?
I am working on a light-weight JIT engine (download:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sljit/ homepage:
http://sljit.sourceforge.net/) which might be useful for this purpose. I can also share my experiences about JIT compiling techniques.
Regards,
Zoltan