This is amazing. I'm at loss for words.
During my CS years I remember being fascinated by NFA's, as opposed to boring single universe DFA's.
For some reason I internalized that I would never see something like an NFA implemented beyond text books.
Then came Carlini.
But... they are equivalent?
Modulo an exponential blowup! That’s like saying P is equivalent to NP.
The blow up is exponential for carefully crafted academical regular expressions.
im practice is a good idea to build a DFA from your regex, up front (re2) or lazily (ripgrep)