Yes, however it has a startup cost that the function that returns re.search(short_regex, s) and the one with functool.partial don't have, because with these the compilation happens at the first call.

If we use one of these two, the startup time will be reduced a lot, and the runtime will be ~2x faster.
If we use re.compile(short_regex).search the startup time won't be reduced as much, but the runtime will be ~8x faster.

Given that here we are trying to reduce the startup time and not the runtime, I think using one of those two functions is better.

Another possible solution to improve the startup time is trying to optimize _optimize_unicode -- not sure how much can be done there though.