This depends heavily on how repetition is implemented.
With a backtracking-search implementation of regexes, bounded iteration is pretty easy.
But the linked webpage appears to compile regexes to finite state machines (it shows you their finite-state-machine, for instance), and eg [a-z]{1,256} will have 256 states: 256 times the 1 state needed for [a-z]. If [a-z] were a complex regex, you could get a combinatorial explosion.
This alone probably isn't the issue? 256 is not a very large number. But I suspect there are follow-on algorithmic issues. This is just speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised if that 256-state machine were computed by applying DFA minimization, an algorithm with worst-case exponential running time, to a more naively generated machine.
With a backtracking-search implementation of regexes, bounded iteration is pretty easy.
But the linked webpage appears to compile regexes to finite state machines (it shows you their finite-state-machine, for instance), and eg [a-z]{1,256} will have 256 states: 256 times the 1 state needed for [a-z]. If [a-z] were a complex regex, you could get a combinatorial explosion.
This alone probably isn't the issue? 256 is not a very large number. But I suspect there are follow-on algorithmic issues. This is just speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised if that 256-state machine were computed by applying DFA minimization, an algorithm with worst-case exponential running time, to a more naively generated machine.