A scripting language written in Rust would certainly fulfill you requirement of only needing to copy one file since they are always statically linked and you can even statically compile against musl so it will work on any Linux system without needing a correct libc. Maybe check out rhai.
Yes, the first one matches only 2 more characters while the second matches 1 or more. Also the +? is a lazy quantifier so it will consume as little as possible.