Add a regular expressions library to the distribution

[brson]

The exact engine we use needs further discussion. Probably we don't want to use yarr because it requires the nitro jit, which is a big dependency and could be undesirable for various reasons. Ideally, we would have a nice syntax extension that precompiles the regexes (in addition to runtime compilation options).

[eholk]

What about writing a regular expression engine in Rust?

[brson]

That could be fine.

[erickt]

For anyone who stumbles across this issue looking for a regex library, we do have a pcre binding in cargo.

[killerswan]

@erickt is that related to @uasi's https://github.com/uasi/rust-pcre ?

[erickt]

@killerswan neat! that seems to be an independent implementation. I'll ping @uasi to merge our code.

[graydon]

nominating for feature-complete

[graydon]

(also, as I mention elsewhere but apparently not in this bug, I prefer re2 for this)

[catamorphism]

(bug triage) Milestone is correct; could be a good medium-sized starter project for somebody.

[nickdesaulniers]

I'm still interested in this. Been working on an cre2 binding. Not 100% sure how to handle functions that expect c enums.

[ktt3ja]

I would like to claim this issue to do as a project for my university class.

[nickdesaulniers]

@ktt3ja , I haven't been working on this.

[glennsl]

I've been working on this, but it's pretty slow going. See https://github.com/glennsl/rust-re

It has a good set of features already, but is currently pretty naively implemented, horribly slow and not very nice to look at. I'm trying to learn rust as I go, and am currently trying to figure out how to optimize it without wandering into unsafe territory.

Feel free to fork it or implement something completely separate. A different perspective would just be good as far as I'm concerned.

[huonw]

There is a wiki page summarising some research about this: https://github.com/mozilla/rust/wiki/Lib-re