nucleo-matcher

nucleo-matcher is a high-performance fuzzy matching library from the Helix editor project. It's 10-100x faster than alternatives like fuzzy-matcher (skim) or fzf.

Why It's Fast

1. Optimized SIMD operations - Uses CPU-level optimizations for character comparisons
2. Reusable scratch memory - Matcher allocates ~135KB once, then reuses it (no allocations during matching)
3. Automatic algorithm fallback - Switches from O(mn) to O(n) greedy matching for large inputs
4. Prefilter acceleration - Uses memchr for fast substring scanning before full matching
5. UTF-32 internal representation - Avoids repeated UTF-8 decoding overhead

Key Types

Matcher

The core matching engine. Expensive to create (~135KB heap allocation), so reuse it.

use nucleo_matcher::{Matcher, Config};