Converting to and from UTF-8 is anything but light-weight, also, accessing and matching in UTF-8 strings is not O(1).
/ Per Hedbor ()
Previous text:
2003-01-29 18:09: Subject: Re: Real-life PCRE vs Regexp benchmarking
OK. Anyway it is not necessary to distribute it with Pike (bundled). And I think that the Author of PCRE might make changes if we ask.
It is actually more or less nessesary, I don't think it would be a good idea to have one pike version that can have totally different regexp engines.
And if the licenses are compatible, it's not even nessesary to change the license.
And, also, I really do think that it's best to have int32 as the basic type, perhaps compiled like the lexer, though, with different versions for size_shift 0, 1 and 2. Then you don't loose any performance, and get wide-string support.
/ Per Hedbor ()