Matching against some patterns does not terminate

[telnet23]

If the pattern is such that it should successfully match the empty string, then matching against the pattern in list context with the global modifier set does not terminate. For example:

my $s = "tood";
my $p = "a*";
my @m = $s =~ /$p/g;

In Perl, the above yields an array of $n + 1 empty strings, where $n is the length of $s. When using RE2, the above does not terminate and causes the machine to run out of memory.