Rather than go to all this hassle, I think it’s much easier to use Cython, or even to write C and just wrap it with Cython/Ctypes. Performance is so much better.
He jumps straight from the problem to codegen-based solutions, but I wonder if a simpler loop specialization would yield a big enough chunk of the performance he got. If you hoist the comparator handling higher up into a single branch per query, then have a separate loop for each, you avoid unnecessary branching in your hot loop. You'd have to duplicate logic for every comparator, which is a little ugly, but there were only a few comparators, and that seems a lot more palatable if the alternative is an elaborate codegen solution.
> Mypyc compiles Python modules to C extensions. It uses standard Python type hints to generate fast code. Mypyc uses mypy to perform type checking and type inference.
>
> Mypyc can compile anything from one module to an entire codebase. The mypy project has been using mypyc to compile mypy since 2019, giving it a 4x performance boost over regular Python.
[0] -- https://github.com/PyO3/pyo3
Elsewhere iirc, V8, which is written in C++, can use runtime code generation for regexes.
Apart from Cython and other C/C++ bindings one might also want to look at JIT compilers like Numba (or Jax and Pytorch for number crunching).
I don’t find Python ergonomic enough to justify the performance penalty.
I did read the rest of your comment; I was just not responding to that part.