Interactive highlighting is probably not the right thing, but it would be good when first opening a large file. I suspect most of the overhead, though, is just

Interactive highlighting is probably not the right thing, but it would be good when first opening a large file. I suspect most of the overhead, though, is just in maintaining state related to the highlighted sections and not in the initial matching, but maybe. Another neat application might be ad blocking extensions, where there are bajillions of rules. The text is small, but the rules update infrequently enough to make it worthwhile and there are so many repeated requests from a page load that a smidgen improvement in evaluation could lead to a perceptible page load decrease.