Improve performance of regular expression back-references.
In some cases, at the time that we're doing an NFA-based precheck
of whether a backref subexpression can match at a particular place
in the string, we already know which substring the referenced
subexpression matched. If so, we might as well forget about the NFA
and just compare the substring; this is faster and it gives an exact
rather than approximate answer.
In general, this optimization can help while we are prechecking within
the second child expression of a concat node, while the capture was
within the first child expression; then the substring was saved during
cdissect() of the first child and will be available to NFA checks done
while cdissect() recurses into the second child. It can help quite a
lot if the tree looks like
concat
/ \
capture concat
/ \
expensive stuff backref
as we will be able to avoid recursively dissecting the "expensive
stuff" before discovering that the backref isn't satisfied with a
particular midpoint that the lower concat node is testing. This
doesn't help if the concat tree is left-deep, as the capture node
won't get set soon enough (and it's hard to fix that without changing
the engine's match behavior). Fortunately, right-deep concat trees
are the common case.
Patch by me, reviewed by Joel Jacobson
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/661609.
1614560029@sss.pgh.pa.us