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While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2016 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Regular Expressions in C++, Present and Future

by Tim Shen

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

Regular expressions are widely used in application development and data processing, yet it is challenging to design and implement a regular expression library that is expressive, efficient and safe.

In this talk, Tim Shen, the current maintainer of libstdc++'s ＜regex＞, will introduce the basics of implementing regular expressions in C++, the status of existing implementations, and what is expected from the standardization process.

For the implementation, several data structures and algorithms will be introduced, with pros and cons listed; we will show how several popular implementations (Boost.Regex, Boost.Xpressive, ＜regex＞ from standard library implementations, RE2, etc) pick their algorithms. Several popular features/patterns that hurt performance will be explained, with a "safe" regex usage suggested. Finally a wishlist of features will be presented, in order to deliver a more efficient and usable regex library.