diff(1)

[Tim Robbins]

On Fri, Sep 17, 2004 at 07:35:07PM -0400, Brian Fundakowski Feldman wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 17, 2004 at 04:06:20PM -0700, Sean Chittenden wrote:
> > >I don't know how much they've changed it, but I do know that it still
> > >uses whichever regexp engine you happen to have in libc.  In our case,
> > >that means good old Henry Spencer.  Last I talked to him, he was going
> > >to release a new, improved, and much faster regexp engine, but that
> > >was years ago and I still haven't seen anything come out of it.
> > 
> > Actually, that's not quite correct.  Spencer's latest regexp(3) was 
> > integrated into PostgreSQL 7.4 to provide wide-byte regexp support 
> > (released on 2003-11-17).  Last I checked, it was being used regularly 
> > and with good success as it's gotten a good ten months of production 
> > use.  :)
> > 
> > From the PostgreSQL 7.4 release notes:
> > 
> > 	"Faster and more powerful regular expression code
> > 
> > 	"The entire regular expression module has been replaced with a  new 
> > version by Henry Spencer, originally written for Tcl. The  code greatly 
> > improves performance and supports several flavors  of regular 
> > expressions."
> 
> I'll certainly have to try it out and see whether or not it's faster
> than Oniguruma (http://www.geocities.jp/kosako1/oniguruma/).  Either
> one should be more than suitable for libc if it's got enough of a
> performance improvement.

Oniguruma is not suitable because it does not have proper locale support -- it
uses its own character type tables instead of using <wctype.h>, and its own
multibyte character encoding functions instead of <wchar.h>.


Tim