slow str:gmatch(), str:match() pattern

[Egil Hjelmeland <privat@...>]

    line = (' '):rep(50000):match'([^\n]*)\n'

takes > 20 seconds on my PC. Adding a start-anchor:

    line = (' '):rep(50000):match'^([^\n]*)\n'

is instant. Just getting the position of newline:

    pos = (' '):rep(50000):match'\n()' 

is also instant. Tested on lua 5.[123]

Actually I was using a gmatch() loop to parse out lines from blocks of data read from a socket, so adding the start-anchor was not an option.
So I ended up refactoring the whole thing using str:find() and str:sub().

It seems  str:match'([^\n]*)\n' tries really hard to find a matching substring, even though it should be clear after first scan that is not possible.

Could that be optimized without adding too much complexity or affecting performance of other pattern matching cases?

BR/

Egil Hjelmeland