[LLVMdev] Regular Expression lib support

[Chris Lattner]

On Aug 23, 2009, at 5:50 PM, OvermindDL1 wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 6:32 PM, Daniel Dunbar<daniel at zuster.org>  
> wrote:
>> This is too heavy, and we don't need the extra features, and regexec
>> is well tested and much more standard. Unless there is an  
>> overwhelming
>
> 'regexec' I had never heard of, figured it was a library, turns out it
> is a function call on *nix systems, yea, that is very much not usable
> in any way shape or form, and is certainly not a standard if it does
> not work on one of the major LLVM platforms (and it is still not a
> standard in any pure form since it is not part of the C/C++ standard
> headers).  If that is option #2, then option #2 is very unusable.
>
> And yes, if you must know, I program on Windows, which is why I am
> pushing to use something that actually works everywhere instead of
> just someone's favorite OS (I prefer BSD honestly, but Windows is what
> the desktop world is sadly stuck on, so that is what I have to program
> for).

I think you're seriously confused about the proposal.  To put it  
bluntly, there is no way we'll use boosts regex support, sorry.

The proposal is to use the unix standard regexec library interface.   
The LLVM tree would include an imported BSD-licenced implementation  
from one of many sources.  We'd then have configury logic detect when  
the host OS already supports the regexec interfaces, and if so, don't  
build our imported copy.

We'd have a simple layer on top of it to make the interface to the  
regex library less horrible than what regexec provides.

Again, forget boost regex. :)

-Chris