Regular expression library benchmarks

Question

I have been wondering about the performance of regular expression implementations lately, and have had a hard time coming up with much useful information.

Its easy enough to benchmark browser/javascript regex performance (plenty of tools on the net). The javascript regex implementation in Chrome and Opera pretty much destroy every other major browser.

But when it comes down to the fastest c++, java, c#, python, etc.. regex implementation, there aren't too many good benchmarks or comparisons.

So, whats the fastest regex library out there with close to complete feature implementation? (not too concerned about back-references)

Answer 1

Although I haven't done more than a couple of tests myself, I believe that the re2 library was meant to be fast so I'm guessing it is ;)

However, to make this a little more constructive. Take a look at this benchmark: http://lh3lh3.users.sourceforge.net/reb.shtml