Package: libre2-9 (20220601 dfsg-1 and others)

efficient, principled regular expression library

RE2 is a fast, safe, thread-friendly alternative to backtracking regular expression engines like those used in PCRE, Perl, and Python. It is a C library.

RE2 uses automata theory to guarantee that regular expression searches run in time linear in the size of the input. RE2 implements memory limits, so that searches can be constrained to a fixed amount of memory. RE2 is engineered to use a small fixed C stack footprint no matter what inputs or regular expressions it must process; thus RE2 is useful in multithreaded environments where thread stacks cannot grow arbitrarily large.

On large inputs, RE2 is often much faster than backtracking engines; its use of automata theory lets it apply optimizations that the others cannot.

Tags: Role: Shared Library

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