OK thanks for the clarifications. I responded to BurntSushi and others here: https://lobste.rs/s/fq8uil/aho_corasick https://lobste.rs/s/fq8uil/aho_corasick

OK thanks for the clarifications. I responded to BurntSushi and others here: https://lobste.rs/s/fq8uil/aho_corasick https://lobste.rs/s/fq8uil/aho_corasick https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23665341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23665341 I don't have experience with captures in re2c, but it's entirely automata-based, and they apparently implement something "fast" for captures and published it in this 2017 paper, so it's pretty new: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.08837 https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.08837 I'm sort of interested in benchmarking some Sublime-ish workloads with it, but I'm not sure I'll have time. ---- And the other claim from that comment is that while regular languages aren't powerful enough by themselves for syntax highlighting, you can add a trivial state machine on top of them (perhaps Vim-like), and get something more powerful and faster than Sublime's model. I'd have to look at the captures vs. lookahead issue more closely, but the general claim is that I think Sublime has a bad parsing model based on a sloppy application of Perl-style regexes (e.g. if you are really forced to read every byte multiple times, that seems dumb, and can be avoided with regular languages)