I have a patch, it makes the date parser also ignore any repeated whitespace, but I want @micstriit to review before I merge it
date parsing in 6 is roughly 50% faster with java 21 and the newer approach
in 5 it threw a lot of exceptions trying to parse, which adds overhead and was syncronized as it used the non thread safe older java date functions
6 does some clever checking to identify which masks could match based on characters present in the source string
caused some regression pain along the way, but the result was worth it!
it also keeps track of your most commonly used masks and checks them first