Description
You might be interested to know that the Go regexp library uses finite automata already to implement the regexp package. From that package:
The regexp implementation provided by this package is guaranteed to run in time linear in the size of the input. ... For more information about this property, see
It should be trivial(1) to replace the current shellstyle matcher with a translation to the regexp module, and to check for performance differences.
(1) exercise left to the reader
The one place where shellstyle might be faster than regexp is if you require start and end matching and allow only one glob in the middle. At that point, shellstyle becomes a shortcut for startswith("stuff before *") AND endswith("stuff after *") AND len(string) > len(expression).