regex VS node-re2

The homepage has a benchmark that compares Zed's "insertion latency" to other editors, and this is the description:

> Open input.rs at the end of line 21 in rust-lang/regex. Type z 10 times, measure how long it takes for each z to display since hitting the z key.

Could someone clarify what that means? My interpretation of that was to go to https://github.com/rust-lang/regex/blob/master/regex-cli/arg... and start typing 'z' at the end of line 21, but that doesn't seem to make any sense. I guess that repo got refactored and those instructions are out of date?

We also used the avenue to sluggify the question title. We used regex to fish out and replace all occurrences of punctuation and symbol characters with an empty string and using the itertools crate, we joined the words back together into a single string, where each word is separated by a hyphen ("-").

Command-Line Rust taught me how to use crates like clap, assert_cmd, and regex. I felt lost before because I didn't know about Rust's ecosystem--which is arguably as important as the language itself. Also, looking up and comparing libraries is a tiring task! blessed.rs is nice but Command-Line Rust really saved me from analysis paralysis.

burntsushi actually regrets making regex replace return a Cow: https://github.com/rust-lang/regex/issues/676#issuecomment-6.... I’m glad it does, and wish it took an impl Into> there, for the reasons discussed in the issue, but burntsushi has a lot more experience of the practical outcomes of this. Just something more to think about.

I'm not familiar with the AoC problem. You might be able to. But RegexSet doesn't give you match offsets.

You can drop down to regex-automata, which does let you do multi-regex search and it will tell you which patterns match[1]. The docs have an example of a simple lexer[2]. But... that will only give you non-overlapping matches.

You can drop down to an even lower level of abstraction and get multi-pattern overlapping matches[3], but it's awkward. The comment there explains that I had initially tried to provide a higher level API for it, but was unsure of what the semantics should be. Getting the starting position in particular is a bit of a wrinkle.

[1]: https://docs.rs/regex-automata/latest/regex_automata/meta/in...

[2]: https://docs.rs/regex-automata/latest/regex_automata/meta/st...

[3]: https://github.com/rust-lang/regex/blob/837fd85e79fac2a4ea64...

It’s not quite that simple, but folks are working on it.

https://github.com/rust-lang/regex/issues/425#issuecomment-1...

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/211#issuecomment-...

Dependencies used: - regex - unicode_reader - rust decimal - tokio

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall19/cos226/l... and https://kean.blog/post/lets-build-regex are excellent introductions to implementing a (very) simplified regex engine: construct a nondetermistic finite state automaton for the regex, then perform a graph search on the resulting digraph; if the vertex corresponding to your end state is reachable, you have a match.

I think this exercise is valuable for anyone writing regexes to not only understand that there's less magic than one might think, but also to visualize a bunch of balls bouncing along an NFA - that bug you inevitably hit in production due to catastrophic backtracking now takes on a physical meaning!

Separately re: the OP, https://github.com/rust-lang/regex/issues/822 (and specifically BurntSushi's comment at the very end of the issue) adds really useful context to the paragraph in the OP about niche APIs: https://blog.burntsushi.net/regex-internals/#problem-request... - searching with multiple regexes simultaneously against a text is both incredibly complex and incredibly useful, and I can't wait to see what the community comes up with for this pattern!

There are regex automata implementations like RE2 which guarantee execution in linear time and essentially solve this issue. You could consider node-re2 and re2-wasm if you're handling user-supplied regexes. Though note that back-tracking engines are faster on non-pathological input which is why they're the default.

A good way to approach writing native addons could be: * Read this intro article https://blog.sqreen.com/building-a-native-add-on-for-node-js-in-2019/ (disclaimer, I wrote this one) * Read the source code of some simple addon examples (https://github.com/uhop/node-re2, https://github.com/kelektiv/node.bcrypt.js#readme) * read the nodejs doc on native addons * read the libuv book if you want to handle asynchronous stuff in your addons * read Node.js source code