Fair enough. I think that implementation is a dreadful straight NFA implementation - and, IIRC, is not used in RE2 for pure NFA code.
It's not a dreadful way of implementing regex as it can do things a straightforward bitset NFA implementation can't.
To be fair, I think your original post does stand, but I guess I am a bit pedantic about the terminology after spending a little bit of time on regex implementation.
In fact, a number of strategies in regex implementation turned out to generalize to broader areas. The bitwise automata are helpful elsewhere, as are many of the strategies one might use to make them fast. The 4 Russians technique ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_Four_Russians ) has also cropped up all over the place.
It's not a dreadful way of implementing regex as it can do things a straightforward bitset NFA implementation can't.
To be fair, I think your original post does stand, but I guess I am a bit pedantic about the terminology after spending a little bit of time on regex implementation.
In fact, a number of strategies in regex implementation turned out to generalize to broader areas. The bitwise automata are helpful elsewhere, as are many of the strategies one might use to make them fast. The 4 Russians technique ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_Four_Russians ) has also cropped up all over the place.