On Wed, 20 Jun 2018, Daniel Richard G. wrote: > Is it not feasible for the serialized form to be forward-compatible with > later versions of PCRE2?
Zoltán may correct me on this, but basically we felt that this would be too much of a constraint on future development. Changes to what is compiled are not ruled out - in fact there's an item buried somewhere in my "potential work" list to redesign how classes work because over the years the code has got contorted and hard to understand. It may not happen, but we wanted to be able to change the internal form of compiled patterns without constraint. Of course, in theory one could support old and new versions of something, but this would involve tests and alternate paths and the maintenance of old code, all of which I felt was too much of a burden for the maintainer, even if performance wasn't hit. I have no idea how widely the serializing feature is used. I suppose we could invent the idea of a "format version" for the compiled code. The serialization functions could check this instead of the PCRE2 version number. Zoltán: (are you reading this?) What do you think? That seems an easy solution. Philip -- Philip Hazel -- ## List details at https://lists.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/pcre-dev
