[surrealize]

> From what I gather I was basically at fault for daring to somewhat disagree with burntsushi.

Not so much for disagreeing. More for engaging a lower-effort way (than the person you were talking to) and appearing to assume that burntsushi was coming from a place of ignorance.

> The whole "general-purpose regex engine" thing was moving the goalposts in the first place and not very relevant to this whole discussion anyway. EDIT: I'm not saying that these distinctions don't matter at all, rather what I want to say is that it doesn't make sense to implicitly call upon a subjective and arbitrary standard.

"general-purpose regex engine" is a direct response to "most regexp libraries are stuck in the 80s/90s". It's about why the regex libraries most people use (the general-purpose ones) haven't adopted the ideas that you're advocating. Seems on-point to me; on HN most readers will be mainly familiar with the general-purpose libraries, so they'll be thinking in terms of those.