Erlang downsides?

[Bob Ippolito]

On 8/31/06, Robert Virding <robert.virding@REDACTED> wrote:
> Bob Ippolito wrote:
> > The regexp module in Erlang is slow because it's a simple
> > implementation and it doesn't cache compiled regular expressions. It
> > also doesn't support modern regex features that you get with Perl or
> > Python, making it even less attractive.
>
> The benefit of having it in Erlang is that you can DO things with the
> regexps in erlang. I am working on a version of regexp with a compiler
> and it will be intersting to see how much difference it makes.

I wasn't saying that it's a bad idea to have the implementation be
pure Erlang, just that the current implementation is lacking the
performance characteristics and features that people have come to
expect from other languages over the years.

> Anyway some of the modern regex features aren't too nice anyway, and
> some definitely make them go slowly.

The two features I use most that the stdlib implementation doesn't
implement are the verbose syntax and named groups, which are more for
readability/maintainability than anything else.

-bob