match: use util.re.escape instead of re.escape For a pathological .hgignore with over 2500 glob lines and over 200000 calls to re.escape, and with re2 available, this speeds up parsing the .hgignore from 0.75 seconds to 0.20 seconds. This causes e.g. 'hg status' with hgwatchman enabled to go from 1.02 seconds to 0.47 seconds.

util.re: add an escape method The escape method in at least one of the modules called 're2' is in C. This means it is significantly faster than the Python code written in 're'. An upcoming patch will have benchmarks.