The Application deployment tool has the option to strip out the optimizing compiler from the resulting image. Since regular expressions compile to Factor code, this creates a minor performance-related caveat.
Regular expressions constructed at runtime from a deployed application will be compiled with the non-optimizing compiler, which is always available because it is built into the Factor VM. This will result in lower performance than when using the optimizing compiler.
Literal regular expressions constructed at parse time do not suffer from this restriction, since the deployed application is loaded and compiled before anything is stripped out.
None of this applies to deployed applications which include the optimizing compiler, or code running inside a development image.