Too much of a weighty dependency and too much of a niche IMO. For example, the last time I tried to build Hyperscan, I failed and gave up after 15 minutes of trying.
I would have thought you just need to include the rust-hyperscan crate[1] which would take care of that for you (but that crate probably didn't exist when you looked at it). I don't have a sense on the impact it has on overall binary size.
I don't think the existence of a crate or not really impacts anything I said. More to the point, it would put a reliance on someone else to maintain a crate for critical functionality in ripgrep. (And if that fell through, I would invariably need to pick up that burden. Removing functionality is a lot harder than adding it.)
It makes a lot more sense to me for something like Hyperscan to be maintained out of tree. I did work with the patch author a bit, and in particular, made some changes to ripgrep to make maintaining such a fork easier: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/issues/1488
Bottom line is, a lot of people think that adding a dependency has nearly zero cost. But it doesn't. Not by a long shot.
