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Free software hijacked Philip Hazel's life
[LWN subscriber-only content] Philip Hazel was 51 when he began the Exim message transfer agent (MTA) project in 1995, which led to the Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) project in 1998. At 80, he's maintained PCRE, and its successor PCRE2, for more than 27 years.
He chose a regular-expression library written by Henry Spencer for early versions of Exim, but found it limiting compared to Perl's extended pattern-matching features. After a while, PCRE looked beyond Perl to include features such as recursion inside a regular expression, and named subpatterns (borrowed from Python), as well as other ideas taken from other regular-expression implementations. Indeed, just looking to see the installed software that depends on the PCRE2 library on Fedora 40 turns up use by Git, Grep, MariaDB, nmap, SELinux's command-line tools, Sway, Wget 2, and quite a few others.
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