libregex library

[Sean Chittenden]

>>   Has there been any thought given to moving to the modified Henry
>> Spencer regex library used in NetBSD & OpenBSD's libc?
>
> des at dwp ~% head -3 /usr/src/lib/libc/regex/COPYRIGHT
> Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 Henry Spencer.  All rights reserved.
> This software is not subject to any license of the American Telephone
> and Telegraph Company or of the Regents of the University of 
> California.

I think maybe what Ben was referring to was that Spencer has released 
an updated version of his regexp library that doesn't penalize wide 
character locales.  I believe our current one performs terribly on 
everything but one byte character sets, whereas the newer Spencer 
library performs as well as one could hope with wide characters.  The 
PostgreSQL group did some testing and found Spencers library to be the 
fastest wide character regexp engine while still maintaining very good 
levels of performance for single byte character sets.  You'll have to 
check the PostgreSQL archives for details: it's been two years since 
that change was committed to their tree.  -sc

-- 
Sean Chittenden