rure-go VS gohs

rure-go (regex 1.9.3) - uses the Rust regex engine with CGo bindings. The downside is a Rust library dependency that needs to be compiled;

Totally agreed: almost all users (me/GoAWK included) want performance and don't care nearly as much about simplicity under the hood. Simplicity of implementation is of value for educational purposes, but we could easily have a small, simple 3rd party package for that. Go's regexp package is kinda too complex for a simple educational demonstration and too simple to be fast. :-)

I actually tried BurntSushi's https://github.com/BurntSushi/rure-go (bindings to Rust's regex engine) with GoAWK and it made regex handling 4-5x as fast for many regexes, despite the CGo overhead. However, rure-go (and CGo in general) is a bit painful to build, so I'm not going to use that. Maybe I'll create a branch for speed freaks who want it.

I've also thought of using https://gitlab.com/cznic/ccgo to convert Mawk's fast regex engine to Go source and see how that performs. Maybe on the next rainy day...

gohs (1.2.2 + hs5.4.1) - regex engine designed for high performance. It is implemented as a library that provides a simple C-API. It also requires compilation and linking of third-party dependencies;