CHchubot·Jun 30, 2019
RE2 was used in Google Code Search in an adversarial context, and it handles the DFA issue by simply putting an 8MB limit on the DFA for a regex:
https://github.com/google/re2/blob/master/re2/re2.h#L601
I learned a few months ago that Rust's regex crate, which is based heavily on RE2, does the same thing.
There is perhaps something worth exploring there, but after reading the Cox articles, I can see that there are so many issues that come up in regex implementation, and this seems to be one of the smaller ones.
I don't think the "regex as untrusted data" use case is very common. That is, there are probably 10,000 programs that use regexes for every one that accepts regexes from users.
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Although, one thing I've wanted to explore is Regex derivatives. Supposedly that technique constructs an optimal DFA directly. You don't have to ma
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ke an NFA, convert it to a DFA, and then optimize the DFA.
Cox describes it as a "win-win" here (in contrast to parsing with derivatives, which is asymptotically worse than traditional parsing algorithms)
https://research.swtch.com/yaccalive
There a bunch of non-production implementations floating around like
https://github.com/google/redgrep
https://github.com/MichaelPaddon/epsilon
(This technique was revived by the 2009 paper cited)
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Regarding the blog post, I have some material here. I gave about 10% of this as a 5-minute talk, and realized it's about 2 hours worth of material.
https://www.oilshell.org/share/05-31-pres.html
I still think the table toward the end is a good summary and perhaps worth publishing with some more context / explanation.
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One interesting test of whether the message from Cox's articles got through is what style of regex engine newer languages are using.
I just noticed Julia uses PCRE, which is unfortunate IMO. I like RE2 -- it has a nice API, great performance, and a lot of features.
https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/strings/index.html#R...
Swift also has Perl-style regexes, but maybe they inherited it from Objective C:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/nsregul...
So basically Rust is the only newer language that appears to have gotten the message.
The Oil shell will of course use "regular languages" rather than regexes, but that's natural because shell never had Perl-style regexes.
One thing I think Cox didn't explore enough is that most libc's appear to be using the "fast" good method, because they don't need Perl constructs.
I guess that would be a good follow-up article. To test GNU libc and musl libc on those pathological cases. I looked at their code a few years ago and they looked "right" (I've forgotten the details), but I don't think I ever did the test.