A regular-expression library with PCRE/PECL-compatible syntax, implemented as a
Thompson NFA / Pike VM so a bad pattern from a modder can NEVER cause
catastrophic backtracking — matching is O(n·m), never exponential. `(a+)+$` on
40 non-matching chars, `(a*)*b`, `(.*a){20}b` all run in microseconds; a 50 KB
input scans in ~7 ms.
The engine (runtime/native/regex.ludic + regex_vm.ludic, ~700 lines of Ludic, no
C) parses a pattern to a small bytecode program — an unanchored lazy `.*?` prefix
makes a plain search match anywhere — and the VM runs every alive thread in
lockstep per input byte, deduped by program counter and carrying capture slots
(save/restore, leftmost-greedy priority). Supported: literals, `.`, classes
`[...]` (ranges, negation, `\d \w \s` and their negations), anchors `^ $`,
alternation `|`, capturing and `(?:…)` groups, and `* + ? {n} {n,} {n,m}` in
greedy or lazy form, plus the common escapes; numbered capture groups. Errors are
values — an invalid pattern compiles to null, never a crash. Backreferences and
look-around are out of scope for a linear engine, and on the degenerate case of a
nullable subpattern under an unbounded quantifier positions may differ from a
backtracking engine (the price of the linear-time guarantee) — documented.
Surface (Regex.*, aliased in emit_call.ludic to the regex_* functions):
compile / valid / matches / test / find / exec / next / replace / group /
group_count / start / end / ok.
The runtime is spliced on demand: the parser sets a flag when it sees `Regex.`
and maybe_splice_runtime imports the engine — so it costs nothing in a program
that doesn't use it and works in a plain tool (not just an ECS game).
Verified against Python's `re` as an oracle: a 20k-case grammar fuzzer agrees
100% on realistic patterns (0 / 15000 with capture groups) and 99.8% on group-0
spans across the full pathological grammar, the residual being the documented
nullable-quantifier case. examples/library/regex.ludic asserts the behaviour
(wired into `x test`, now 60 passed); docs: a Regex section + 13 per-symbol
pages, inventory + coverage green. Seed reseeded; the C-free bootstrap fixpoint
holds.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
866 B
866 B
| id | name | category | kind | tokens | sig | tip | order | ns | member |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| regex-compile | Regex.compile | regex | namespace-method | Regex.compile | Regex.compile(pattern) -> Regex | Compile a pattern once for reuse; returns an error value (null) if it is invalid. | 1 | Regex | compile |
Compiles pattern to a reusable Regex and returns it, or null if the pattern is malformed — so a bad pattern is a value you can check, never a crash. Compiling once and reusing with Regex.test / Regex.exec avoids re-parsing the pattern every call, which matters in a hot loop.
Parameters:
pattern— the regular expression source
program Demo {
entry {
let re = Regex.compile("^\\d{4}-\\d{2}-\\d{2}$")
if Regex.test("2026-08-31", re) { print(1) }
}
}