> There simply aren’t that many folks working on regex engines. You'd be surprised: there's even a dedicated annual international conference on implementation

> There simply aren’t that many folks working on regex engines. You'd be surprised: there's even a dedicated annual international conference on implementation of automata that has been going since 1996: <https://link.springer.com/conference/wia https://link.springer.com/conference/wia> There are constantly new algorithms, libraries, tools and applications around regular languages and regular relations (an extension of regular expression that is more elegant, symmetric, expressive and takes a lot of the ugliness of regexes out). Simplifying somewhat, finite state transducers are NFAs "with output". See e.g. FOMA at <https://fomafst.github.io/ https://fomafst.github.io/>.