ry usage with search
speed. The single contiguous allocation also uses less overhead per state and
enables compression tricks where most states only use 8 bytes of heap memory.

When given the choice between these two, you almost always want to pick a
contiguous NFA. It takes only a little longer to build, but both its memory
usage and search speed are typically much better than a noncontiguous NFA. A
noncontiguous NFA is useful when prioritizing build times, or when there are
so many patterns that a contiguous NFA could not be built. (Currently, because
of both memory and search speed improvements, a contiguous NFA has a smaller
internal limit on the total number of NFA states it can represent. But you
would likely need to have hundreds of thousands or even millions of patterns
before you hit this limit.)