I don’t know about that, but “$list filter” could be better. If you profile that russian tiddlywiki you linked, you’ll see that typing stuff into the search bar lags, and it’s because the browser is spending >50% of its time in garbage collection.
Filters make a ton of extraneous arrays. And they usually freshly compile with every single implementation. These are things that could be improved upon. “<$list filter” could hold onto its compiled filters, so it doesn’t toss them out. And it may be time to seriously consider lazy evaluations of filters. I’ve proposed the idea before, and made POCs of it, but tiddlywiki slowdown is becoming an issue for me too, and it all points to bad memory use.
I may do a deeper dig into the expense of filters and push for lazy versions of them soon.