Dan writes:I don't think we're going to be able to manage doing our matches in 20% of the time of the current regex engine. That's a bit ambitious, even for me. :)
I dunno, there are a number of extant cases of languages that manage to run regexes just as fast as the current regex engine. The fact that they happen to, well, _embed_ the current regex engine may be germane...
True enough. Oh, don't get me wrong, I think we can go faster than the perl 5 regex engine. I just don't think we can do in 2 seconds what takes perl 5 10 seconds... :-P
Although the next regex engine has to deal with the horribly crufty new perl6 syntax, at this point I'm willing to put down $50 that after all the boiling what we get at the bottom of the saucepot looks much like:
regex P0, P1, P2
and not much like 2000 lines of pasm, but I've been wrong before and will be again.
Last time I looked at the perl 5 regex engine (and I'm still recovering, but the medication's helping) it was just a little bytecode engine with massive amounts of Nasty Evil piled on top. I think we can get a nice boost from the JIT or computed goto core, enough so that a single big bytecode interpreter (parrot) will work better than two smaller bytecode interpreters (which is what perl 5 w/the regex engine is, more or less)
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Dan
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