Re: POSIX regex performance bug in 7.3 Vs. 7.2

On Tue, 2003-02-04 at 11:59, Tom Lane wrote:
> I'm about to go off and look at whether we can absorb the Tcl regex
> package, which is Spencer's new baby. That will not be a solution for
> 7.3.anything, but it could be an answer for 7.4.

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
came across a post this post that indicates he was planning to package
the new RE engine separately:

http://infosoc.uni-koeln.de/pipermail/php/1999-February/000019.html

but I wasn't able to find a release of it anywhere -- I'll let the list
know if/when he gets back to me.

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). But switching to another engine might
impose backward-compatibility problems, in terms of the details of the
RE syntax.

Cheers,

Neil
--
Neil Conway <neilc(at)samurai(dot)com> || PGP Key ID: DB3C29FC