On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 11:29 AM, <s...@pobox.com> wrote: > > >> There are major practical problems associated with making such a leap > >> directly (Google's re2 engine is in C++ rather than C and we'd have > >> to keep the existing implementation around regardless to handle the > >> features that re2 doesn't support). > > Collin> I don't see why C++ would be a deal-breaker in this case, since > Collin> it would be restricted to an extension module. > > Traditionally Python has run on some (minority) platforms where C++ was > unavailable. While the re module is a dynamically linked extension module > and thus could be considered "optional", I doubt anybody thinks of it as > optional nowadays. It's used in the regression test suite anyway. It would > be tough to run unit tests on such minority platforms without it. You'd > have to maintain both the current sre implementation and the new re2 > implementation for a long while into the future.
re2 is not a full replacement for Python's current regex semantics: it would only serve as an accelerator for a subset of the current regex language. Given that, it makes perfect sense that it would be optional on such minority platforms (much like the incoming JIT). Collin _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
