IBM Mainframe Forum

A new version of the PCRE2 regex engine for z/OS was released and would be posted on CBTTAPE (file 939) soon.
1. The main interpreter, pcre2_match(), has been refactored into a
new version that does not use recursive function calls (and
therefore the stack) for remembering backtracking positions.
This makes --disable-stack-for-recursion a NOOP. The new
implementation allows backtracking into recursive group calls in
patterns, making it more compatible with Perl, and also fixes some
other hard-to-do issues such as #1887 in Bugzilla. The code is
also cleaner because the old code had a number of fudges to try to
reduce stack usage. It seems to run no slower than the old code.

We are looking for volunteers for two potential improvements:
1. A PL/I expert to create native PL/I include modules for full PL/I support (I have some idea how to code in PL/I, but an expert would do a better job.)
2. A CEEPIPI expert to help us persist the library for the Rexx API to allow less costly Rexx support (John Gateley wrote a very good and working basic Rexx API, but without persisting the library in the LE environment. every call has to start the expensive compile from scratch. I admit that I tried to read the CEEPIPI documentation several times, just to conclude that I have no idea what does IBM talk about.)


Ze'ev Atlas