Re: Adding a Builtin to EUPHORIA
- Posted by mattlewis (admin) Apr 01, 2014
- 1511 views
I don't think [regex] would have been that much slower. It's how we handle a lot of the stuff in the stdlib, like msgboxes and mmap.
There would be *a lot* more manual memory management. And not just the stuff we have to do to convert a sequence into a C string, but a lot of the structures and things that get passed around. Stuff that goes right on the stack in C (very fast) would be allocated on the heap. For one off stuff, it's not a big deal, but regexes are often used (I know I do) for processing lots of data, over and over.
I don't understand why the existing type system (with regexes being a unique type) wouldn't work with PCRE being a shared library. Jeremy easily went back and forth on this in the code when we were debating this issue.
Oh, yeah, it would work to put our be_pcre.c code into the library along with the actual PCRE code. I got the impression that Shawn was talking about having a euphoria wrapper for a normal PCRE library, though.
We can still do that. Just carry around both the shared and static versions of the PCRE library. If py2exe can turn a Python app (and all its required runtimes) into a single executable, I don't see why we'd have so much trouble with just one library.
This sounds like a completely losing proposition to me. We've just complicated our build and distribution (and probably users' build and distribution of their own programs) for pretty much no gain.
Matt
