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Only that, Ack's core strength over time will always evolve and depend on Perl's regular expression and text processing powers.

So re writing this in C will fundamentally mean endlessly growing a language which will look similar to the Perl implementation. Or a Perl DSL.

Not that its a bad thing, I find it interesting though. I would say you better start with a specification.



Ag supports the same regexes as Ack. I use the PCRE library. I only call pcre_study once, and I use the new PCRE-JIT[1] on systems where it's available. These tweaks add up to a 3-5x speedup over Ack when regex-matching.

1. http://sljit.sourceforge.net/pcre.html


If you use PCRE, you do NOT support the same regexes as Ack.

"Perl Compatible" isn't really Perl compatible, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCRE for details.


Yes, there are a few edge cases, but hardly anyone uses those features. In fact, 90% of the time, most people seem to use literal string matching.




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