Re: [boost] [Booster] Or boost is useless for library developers

Subject: Re: [boost] [Booster] Or boost is useless for library developers
From: John Maddock (boost.regex_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-05-21 04:16:28

> > - Booster.Regex is just a wrapper of PCRE.
>
> Oh heavens. So lets see... no wide character support,

>IMHO wide characters should be vanished from C++ it is the worst way
>to represent Unicode (and I know thing or two about Unicode).
>
>See:
>
>- 
>http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1049947/should-utf-16-be-considered-harmful
>- http://cppcms.sourceforge.net/boost_locale/html/tutorial.html#myths
>
>And PCRE supports Unicode quite well with UTF-8 support.
>And if you really want Unicode - only ICU can help you.

Which is supported by Boost.Regex as well.

For Win 32 work though, you simply cannot escape wchar_t whatever you may 
think of it - this is especially true of the embedded windows platforms 
which are effectively wchar_t only.

> no support for segmented containers (think really large
> texts stored in discontinous memory - I've had people using
> this support to search multi-gigabyte texts that could never
> be stored in memory or searched via a C interface).

>Ahhhhh... Are you running regex over multi-gigabyte texts?
>
>Then something wrong with your design.

Not me, but I know folks who are.  And no there's nothing wrong with their 
design - if you a multi-gigabyte text on disk (from some other source 
outside your control) you have to handle it *somehow*.  Sure you could use 
partial-matches, but they're only an approximation to what you really want 
to do.

John.