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> Aside: out of curiosity it would have been interesting to see how a Thompson NFA[1] would have dealt with this.

It wouldn't have dealt with it right? NFAs and DFAs are equivalent and them being actually regular means they can't do things like count parentheses.

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I miscommunicated the question: "how well would have a Thompson NFA have dealt with this?" I.e. How many magnitudes of order faster would it have been? If it was faster?

NFAs do not do backtracking. So the solution space would look different. More sane, and more performant, but it would not be a pure regex solution.

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