Bug#574276: ITP: re2 -- efficient, principled regular expression library

[Stefano Rivera <stefano@rivera.za.net>]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Stefano Rivera <stefano@rivera.za.net>


* Package name    : re2
  Version         : 0+hg10+dfsg
  Upstream Author : Google Inc.
* URL             : http://code.google.com/p/re2/
* License         : BSD
  Programming Lang: C++
  Description     : efficient, principled regular expression library

RE2 is a fast, safe, thread-friendly alternative to backtracking regular
expression engines like those used in PCRE, Perl, and Python. It is a C++
library.

RE2 uses automata theory to guarantee that regular expression searches run in
time linear in the size of the input. RE2 implements memory limits, so that
searches can be constrained to a fixed amount of memory. RE2 is engineered to
use a small fixed C++ stack footprint no matter what inputs or regular
expressions it must process; thus RE2 is useful in multithreaded environments
where thread stacks cannot grow arbitrarily large.

On large inputs, RE2 is often much faster than backtracking engines; its use
of automata theory lets it apply optimizations that the others cannot.


It hasn't released a version yet, but is reported to have been widely used
within Google for a while. We presume it has stabilised a bit.