Relative speed of globbing and regex implementations

[James Youngman]

I notice that the gnulib fnmatch implementation is slower than the
regex implementation, at least in those cases where a pattern can be
compiled once and offered thousands of times.  Very roughly, I'd guess
that the fnmatch implementation takes about 1.4x the time that the
regex implementation takes.

Is there a known reason for this, is it avoidable, or are we stuck
with it?   I was considering figuring out how to rewrite globs as
regexes, but thought I'd ask first...

Thanks,
James.