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While I don't know the internals of different regex engines, anything that sounds so simple will probably be done by a good regex compiler/engine anyway. The simple | separated list of keywords seems a lot less error prone.

An 2009 article on the V8 blog about a regex optimization they did: http://blog.chromium.org/2009/02/irregexp-google-chromes-new...

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That's where a tool like this could come in handy.

A general purpose regex optimizer can't make assumptions like you don't care about the ordering of sub-groups, but a tool like this can.

If you are just looking for the fastest way to to match any 1 of these 40 keywords, this could make a fast regex that can minimize backtracking.

Like I said, I have no idea if it would make any real difference, but if it did incorporating something like that into a build process for syntax highlighting packages could improve performance for a bunch of people.

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