Re: What’s the deal with #if _LIBC and other non-Emacs code?

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> > I wasn't aware we made such a decision.
>> That's not a decision we took.  The change was on gnulib's side
>> (apparently they switched to glibc's regexp implementation, which makes
>> a lot of sense, actually).
> I meant the decision to abandon hope of merging.

AFAIK the code used in gnulib and glibc is very completely different
from Emacs's, so "merging" back into their code is not really
applicable.  We could try and take their code, add to it the features we
need, and then submit those changes back to them, tho.


        Stefan


PS: I'm not sure exactly what would be missing, but I expect that \s and
\c together with the ability to match on a pair of char* would be the
first candidates.

PPS: I think the most serious problem with our regexp code is its
occasional exponential worst case.  I think changing to another
implementation would make a lot of sense, but only if that other
implementation can use a "Thompson's NFA" style implementation to avoid
those pathological cases.