Re: skip-chars-forward v. re-search-forward

[Richard Stallman]

    Both skip-chars-forward and re-search-forward are builtin functions.  But
    re-search-forward uses a cache for recently used regexps to avoid the
    overhead of compiling it, whereas skip-chars-forward always sets up the
    search map anew.

If skip-chars-forward had a cache, it would probably run faster
than regexp searching.