Re: POSIX regex performance bug in 7.3 Vs. 7.2

Neil Conway <neilc@samurai.com> writes:
> Sounds like we had about the same idea at about the same time -- I
> emailed Henry Spencer inquiring about the new RE engine last night.

I just did that this morning ;-) ... but more as politeness than
anything else.  AFAICT from searching the net, packaging his new code
as a separate library is something that's been on Spencer's TODO list
for several years now.  We've been waiting for him to do it, but I'm now
thinking that it's time to quit waiting.  We can lift the code from Tcl
with probably not all that much more work than if it were an official
separate package.

> Another option is to consider a different regular expression engine. At
> least according to the benchmarks here,
> http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/john_maddock/proposals/exregex.htm
> Spencer's implementation is outperformed by some other RE engines,
> notably PCRE (www.pcre.org).

AFAICT, that page is benchmarking Spencer's old code (the same library
we started from).  His new code is state-of-the-art according to Friedl
in _Mastering Regular Expressions_, 2nd ed 2002 (O'Reilly).
        regards, tom lane