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with this PR, that will also become the equivalent of (?>a*)b.

I suppose you meant the equivalent of (?>a*?)b?

with this PR, that will also become the equivalent of (?>a*)b.

I suppose you meant the equivalent of (?>a*?)b?

No :-) An atomic lazy loop matches only the minimum required. But in the situations relevant to this PR, if there's no overlap between what's guaranteed to come after the loop and the loop itself, the loop has to match as much as possible... if it doesn't and it could have matched more, the pattern can't match because what's next in the pattern won't match. Thus there's no difference between greedy and lazy in terms of the resulting match... a lazy loop would backtrack until it matched the full amount.

Yes sorry, that makes sense, I had a brain freeze for a second and missed the point of the PR 😆