Comment by zackoverflow

Does anyone have any insight on why the PikeVM implementation is slower (it's based on the VM approach described here https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp2.html)

I feel like compiling regex to bytecode and executing it should be faster than dealing with big graph like structures with NFAs/DFAs

Also, V8's regex engines are very fast because they get JIT compiled to machine code, so wouldn't bytecode just be one step higher in abstraction, and have worse but similar performance?