Optimizing std.regex

[Chris via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Monday, 7 November 2016 at 13:13:24 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> Dmitry mentioned here in the forums not long ago that he had 
> squeezed some big performance improvements out of std.regex. 
> His post on the D Blog describes how he managed to do it 
> through an algorithmic optimization.
>
> The post:
> https://dlang.org/blog/2016/11/07/big-performance-improvement-for-std-regex/
>
> Reddit:
> https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5bm1bc/from_the_d_blog_optimizing_stdregex/

Great job! Would it be possible (or indeed worth it) to create a 
similar engine for general text processing / string handling?