> When you think more about regexes this way, you realize that a regex is just a tiny description of a virtual machine (or emulator) that can process the simplest of instructions (check for 'a', accept '0-9', etc.). Each step in the regex is just a piece of bytecode that can execute, and if you turn a regex on its side you can visualize it as just a simple assembly program.

which is _exactly_ what bpf does :)