> BTW, this initialization in the FASTSEARCH code appears to me to be a  mistake:

>    skip = mlast - 1;

Thanks for pointing that out Tim! Turns out PyPy had copied that mindlessly and I just fixed it.

(I'm also generally following along with this issue, I plan to implement the two-way algorithm for PyPy as well, once you all have decided on a heuristic. We are occasionally in a slightly easier situation, because for constant-enough needles we can have the JIT do the pre-work on the  needle during code generation.)