rure-go VS regexcmp

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...

To answer these questions, I wrote a small benchmarking program that can be used to compare different regex engines in terms of speed and memory usage. If you want to test it yourself or evaluate the correctness of the used methods, here is the code.