Re: 4.0a3 - Two Regular Expression Libraries? -- We need your input!
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Mar 21, 2009
- 1118 views
The downside to your suggestion is now that for my program to work, I must distribute my exe, as well as a gob of dll files to go along with it. This is fine for accessories, but regex was decided long ago to be an essential due to it's general use and lack of 50 different ways of doing it.
First, lets recognize that is a Windows-centric issue. Linux/GNU, FreeBSD, and OS X simply don't have this issue because they will generally include the regex libs by default.
However, for regex to be part of the standard library, it must work hassle free on all platforms.
Fortunately, Windows provides a Windows-specific way of solving the issue - we can bundle those external dlls needed on Windows into exw.exe and exwc.exe when they are compiled, and then the dlls are part of the one binary that gets distributed.
The one advantage to bundling PCRE is DOS. If nothing else, we can use Mic's gendll utility to load the Windows pcre.dll from ex.exe and call its routines, so simply having PCRE as a dynamic library doesn't prevent it from being included in DOS. However, for DOS apps one would still need to distribute pcre.dll with the otherwise single binary, so this argument is valid for DOS.
