Regex engine internals as a library
I&#x27;ve only given a quick read&#x2F;skim, but this is extremely impressive. BurntSushi has a lot of create stuff out there, but the Rust regex crate is legendary. The fact that Rust has had such a performant and easy to use regular expression library for so long is a real treat to the community.<p>This article as a whole is also a treasure. There&#x27;s a fairly limited number of people who have written a ton about regular expressions, but they all do so extremely well. Russ Cox&#x27;s article series (as mentioned in this one) is really great. I used it in college to write a regular expression engine one summer after I had started to fall in love with the perfect cross between theory and practice that regular expressions are.<p>The changes for more in depth testing here are also very interesting, especially for a crate that I&#x27;m sure if critical so a lot of the ecosystem, and I appreciate the writeup on such a deep dive topic.<p>Are regular expressions hard to read? Sometimes they can, especially if you haven&#x27;t gone out of your way to take deep dives. Are they not perfect for a lot of parsing tasks? Sure, there are definitely things people shouldn&#x27;t use regexs for that they do, like validating emails. At their core though, regular expressions are one of the most power dense tools we have in pretty much every language. The insane stuff you can get done (sometimes in a way that would be frowned upon) in so little time if just incredible.<p>I&#x27;d love for there to be more content on regular expressions as well. Right now I&#x27;m only familiar with one book that really does a great job (at a practical level), and that&#x27;s Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl. On a theory level, a lot of compiler books will talk about them to varying degrees. The Dragon Book has some good content on regular expressions at an implementation level too.<p>Does anyone have any other book recommendations for regular expressions?<p>And if BurntSushi or any other regular expression engine contributors see this, I really appreciate the effort y&#x27;all put in to building such powerful software.