I can't reproduce this with blead. Bisect using: % Porting/bisect.pl --start=7195e5da55a40d15e29ad80562668bdd6895441f --crash --expect-fail --target=miniperl -e '/(?{})|(??{U:0})/|s|||g' ..leads to 1dfbe6b4ad which is partway through the huge "revamp context system" from DaveM merged in February (at 9d876b687d): It sounds reasonable to me that the context work fixes what appears to be a premature free, so I'm resolving this ticket. Hugo --- via perlbug: queue: perl5 status: open https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=126614