pcre, bifs, drivers and ports

[Ernie Makris]

Hi Robert,

Robert Virding wrote:
>
> While the handling of "f**" in regexp is definitely a bug, which I
> suppose I should fix, it is definitely a legal regular expression. So
> that pcre will not even allow the regular expression is also a bug,
> the question is if it is the parsing of the expression or where?
>
> If you are as "cautious" as people working with cryptography you would
> start wondering if this is sign of a deeper malaise. :-)
>
> As the great Cato said: I still feel that calling the function grep is
> misleading.
>
> Could someone send a real problem to experiment on? Especially one
> which the current regexp module is definitely too slow on.
>
The reason I want pcre support, at least for my own personal sandbox, is
because of features that the regexp library lacks. Not because of
performance. Additionally, if there is a bug in pcre, chances are it
will be fixed more soon than a bug in the erlang regex module(aside from
just doing the work myself, which is fine I guess). Also the reason I
asked about bifs and drivers is to solicit feedback from the list as to
what the best way to implement a binding into the pcre library and what
the drawbacks were of each implementation.

I think this is a good discussion, not sure what everyone else thinks. 
Especially to show that erl bifs are fairly easy to implement, and the
constraints that their implementation should adhere to.

Thanks
Ernie