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

[Richard Stallman]

    It's still surprising that search-forward/backward is more
    than twice faster.  I have no idea what kind of magic the
    boyer-moore search is using.

The comparison between search-forward and skip-chars-forward
does not seem meaningful to me, because they do different jobs.
The only case which both of these functions can do is
(search-forward "a") and (skip-chars-forward "^a").

The time taken by search-forward is inversely proportional to the
search string size in favorable cases, so if you tried a longer
string, it was probably faster.