NEnemoniac·Sep 14, 2023
This has been available in Lisp since at least 2004.
https://github.com/edicl/cl-ppcre/
In Compile time regular expression in C++edicl
cl-ppcre
Common Lisp2016–2023
edicl / cl-ppcre
cl-ppcre
Common Lisp regular expression library
5Distinct people
5Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
320GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Common Lisp regular expression library
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
It have been a few years since I read the code, but it was so beautifully written that I cannot imagine it was screwed up in the meantime: Edi Weitz' CL-PPCRE[1] is a beautiful…
jlg23 used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year5 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-03-13 16:16:39 UTC to 2023-09-14 21:14:36 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
5 sourcesmentioned in this thread:
C
* Lua https://www.lua.org/source/
* Redis https://github.com/redis/redis (mentioned twice)
* Ruby https://github.com/ruby/ruby
* SQLite https://sqlite.org/src/dir?ci=trunk
C++
* Botan https://github.com/randombit/botan
* ClickHouse https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse
Go
* Go's standard library https://cs.opensource.google/go/go
* HashiCorp repos, particular those by Mitchell https://github.com/hashicorp
F#
* jet.com repos https://github.com/jet?language=f%23
Haskell
* Elm compiler https://github.com/elm/compiler
Lisp
* CL-PPCRE https://github.com/edicl/cl-ppcre/
* Mezzano USB driver https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano/blob/master/drivers/usb/m...
PHP
* Carbon https://github.com/briannesbitt/Carbon
* Laravel https://github.com/laravel/laravel
Python
* pytudes (notebooks) https://github.com/norvig/pytudes
R
*
Read the rest
sf (ex of functional OOP) https://github.com/r-spatial/sf
Ruby
* Sequel https://github.com/jeremyevans/sequel/
* Sidekiq https://github.com/sidekiq/sidekiq
Rust
* ripgrep https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
Scala
* fs2 (ex of good type safety) https://github.com/typelevel/fs2
* monix (ex of ugly code with great performance) https://github.com/monix/monix
TypeScript
* GitHub Desktop (ex of SPA) https://github.com/desktop/desktop
---
thanks to: cejast, bb86754, wewxjfq, antonyt, bit, diego_moita, agjmills, freedomben, Contortion, valenterry, DethNinja, mberning, seneca
It have been a few years since I read the code, but it was so beautifully written that I cannot imagine it was screwed up in the meantime: Edi Weitz' CL-PPCRE[1] is a beautiful implementation in CL and highly recommended if one understands one aspect (CL or Perl compatible regular expressions) and wants to learn the other one. IIRC he even discovered some bugs in the original perl implementation while creating this library.
[1] https://github.com/edicl/cl-ppcre
In Building a Regex Engine in Fewer Than 40 Lines of CodeFor Common Lisp people always recommend Edi Weitz's software like CL-PPCRE: http://weitz.de/cl-ppcre/
https://github.com/edicl/cl-ppcre
In LispersThe most beautiful I'm aware of is Robert Strandh's SICL (https://github.com/robert-strandh/SICL). CL-PPCRE (https://github.com/edicl/cl-ppcre) is very nice as well, imo.
What makes them beautiful? They're very straight forward and clearly communicate what they're doing, and how.
And the parentheses in their language of choice softens the visual display of the code -- while the semantics of the language cause the shape of the code to communicate quite a bit about how the machine will go about executing it.
There are no surprises.
In terms of conceptual beauty, it'd be hard to beat Screamer (https://github.com/nikodemus/screamer).
What makes this beautiful? The way it makes a hairy problem seem simple and straight-forward.
In Ask HN: What are some examples of beautiful software?