Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 938d252 4/4: Make regex matching reentrant; update syntax during match

[Perry E. Metzger]

On Sun, 17 Jun 2018 11:51:33 -0700 "Daniel Colascione"
<address@hidden> wrote:
> But anyway, I think the regex code needs a major overhaul.  I was
> actually thinking about forking and vendoring RE2. Granted, having
> done that, you'd need a C++ compiler to build Emacs, but it's
> probably one of the better actively-maintained DFA-based regex
> engines around.

I think needing C++ makes this less than the most obvious choice.

I think the right thing would be to use TRE if we could get Ville
Laurikari to let someone else be the maintainer. Sadly right now it
seems unmaintained and has been for years, but it's fast, complete,
and has the ability to handle things like gap buffers.

This would also give Emacs access to an approximate match facility,
which would be a very neat thing. I often would like to do
approximate searches, and there's no way to do that right now. TRE
would let us do it.

But again, that would be contingent on someone else taking over
maintenance and fixing the backlog of issues it has right now.

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger                address@hidden