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Yes, this is entirely possible. you can even explore the automaton eagerly and detect if it's possible to loop from an accepting state to a nonaccepting one.

Exciting stuff for future work

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Ripgrep does something like thhis. It has a meta regex engine that switches engine when it finds what looks like pathological cases (or rather, the regex-automata crate does, which is used by the regex crate, which powers ripgrep).

https://docs.rs/regex-automata/latest/regex_automata/meta/st...

Ripgrep in turn exposes some knobs to tweak the heuristics

https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/FAQ.md#how...

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