[andrewcooke]

i have a pure python regexp implementation that you can use in pypy (and it passes almost every test used by the cpython re package - only the LOCALE flag is not supported). however, it's around 100x[1] slower that the re package (on simple matches; it's not backtracking so it can be similar in speed for pathological cases).

also, when i looked at pypy the re implementation was in c and looked so similar to cpython's i assumed it was the same or closely related. but i didn't pay much attention, so i may be mistaken.

[1] roughly. it actually runs 6x faster on recent pypy that cpython.