It feels like you're throwing the baby out with the bath water, and I don't think a good regex library could be classified as "simple." I specifically wrote Go

It feels like you're throwing the baby out with the bath water, and I don't think a good regex library could be classified as "simple." I specifically wrote Go bindings to Rust's regex lib in tandem with the C API to make sure I wasn't baking any assumptions into the C API that would make it difficult for another language to bind to them. This process was lucrative. My first draft of the C API defined an iterator that held on to a pointer to the text being searched for the lifetime of the iterator. It turns out that this is inconvenient to use from a language like Go (or perhaps, any language with a moving GC) because C holding on to pointers to memory allocated in the host language can be bad juju. Because I did this process in tandem, I was able to correct the issue at the C API level. As a result, if you need fast regexes in Go, you now have an option, and that option is built on a reasonably mature regex library with thousands of tests and a benchmark harness that sports PCRE1, PCRE2, Tcl, RE2 and Oniguruma, of which, Rust's regex engine compares quite favorably.