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QRS: Epsilon Wrangling

I haven’t shipped any new features for Quamina in many months, partly due to a flow of real-life distractions, but also I’m up against tough performance problems in implementing Regular Expressions at massive scale. I’m still looking for a breakthrough, but have learned things about building and executing finite automata that I think are worth sharing.

I haven’t shipped any new features for Quamina in many months, partly due to a flow of real-life distractions, but also I’m up against tough performance problems in implementing Regular Expressions at massive scale. I’m not going to sketch out the NFA, but just looking at it tells you that it has to have loopbacks; once you’ve matched the parenthetized chunk you need to go back to a state where you can recognize another occurrence. Both of these are problematic because they require allocating memory, and that’s something you really don’t want to do when you’re trying to match patterns to events at Quamina’s historic rate of millions per second.

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