Precompiling as a compile-time optimization would be cool.  I think we are currently favoring doing that kind of thing as an AST optimization step?

I think Raymond and my point was that the current behavior should remain unchanged by default.  So a re.DEFERRED flag whose default is False would be a possible candidate for the "new API" I suggested :)

However, compile time optimization could default to on like our peephole optimizations do[*], I don't think anyone would be upset about that.

[*] There are complaints that you can't turn them *off*, but that's a separate issue :)