well, this was fun... the following code rapidly triggers the OOM killer on my machine (julia 0.4 trunk):
s = repeat("a", 1000000) l = Any[] r = r"^\w" for i in 1:length(s) m = match(r, s[i:end]) push!(l, m.match) end note that: (1) the regexp is only matching one character, so the array l is at most a million characters long. what i think is happening (but this is only a guess) is that s[i:end] is being passed though to the c level regexp library as a new string. the result (m.match) is then a substring into that. because the substring is kept around, the backing string cannot be collected. and so there's an n^2 memory use. ideally, i don't think a new copy of the string should be passed to the regexp engine. maybe i am wrong? anyway, for now, if the above is right, i need some way to copy m.match. as far as i can tell string() doesn't help. so what works? or am i wrong? thanks, andrew