jnode VS regex-automata

Source code here: https://github.com/jnode/jnode

Go has been used to implement OS kernel code,

but it's an interesting piece of software.

Agreed. And I didn't mean to imply that it's impossible to use Go that way, but I think it's fair to say that it's less common and perhaps even less desirable to do that.

OTOH, people have written (at least parts of) Operating Systems in Java[1] even, so never say never...

[1]: https://github.com/jnode/jnode

I believe you're the second person to tell me they were confused by this, so there are probably several others confused but didn't say anything. I've added a warning to the top of regex-automata's README.

For anyone following along at home, we're having a very helpful discussion about the implementation I posted in my sibling comment here: https://github.com/BurntSushi/regex-automata/issues/30

My current technique only gets applied to alternations of simple literals. But the idea is generalizeable and I speculate that it is actually impactful to generalize it.

(I could use '_ => {}' instead of 'None' to save a few more.)

I do find the 'if let' variant to be a bit easier to read. It's optimizing for a particular and somewhat common case, so it does of course overlap with 'match'. But I don't find this particular overlap to be too bad. It's usually pretty clear when to use one vs the other.

But like I said, I could live without 'if let'. It is not a major quality of life enhancement to me. Neither will its impending extensions. i.e., 'if let pattern = foo && some_booolean_condition {'.

[1]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/regex-automata/blob/fbae906823...

[2]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/regex-automata/blob/fbae906823...

(The work on regex-automata 0.2 has been underway for over a year now.](https://github.com/BurntSushi/regex-automata/tree/ag/work) There's a lot done, but still a lot more to go. Once that's done, regex proper should be pretty close to a thin layer that glues regex-syntax, regex-automata, memchr and aho-corasick together. I don't currently expect regex to grow any more dependencies than that. And as it is, aho-corasick and memchr are both optional dependencies. Right now, regex-syntax is the only required dependency, but regex-automata will be added to that list.