[Mono-devel-list] ILBased Regex Engine

[Ben Maurer]

On Thu, 2004-01-15 at 15:55, Francois Beauchemin wrote:
> The only point still unclear is how we will make a compiled regex saved 
> to disk to be able to run on .NET runtime. And of course we will have a 
> lot of work implementing the ILCompiler.

Your idea in the blog that:

> Our major concern is about how to make generated assembly works under
> .NET. The current implementation of Mono regex seem does not support
> .NET compiled regex. We think it is mainly because .NET seem to use
> RegexRunner in these compiled regex.

Is a great start. Basically, we need to implement RegexRunner so that it
does the exact same thing as on the MS platform. This way, the MS
compiled DLL's will work out of the box on Mono. Conversly, we must emit
code that uses these same classes, so that it will work out of the box
on MS.

This actually gives you a nice way to split up your work. One of you can
work on getting RegexRunner working on mono, testing by using assemblies
compiled on Winodws, and getting them to run on Mono. The other person
can work on making the compiler for mono and test his work by running
the classes on windows, where the runtime is already complete.


Now, to find out how to implement RegexRunner, and how to call it, you
will have to take a look at the assemblies MS produces. I suggest you
start with some really simple expressions:

s/foo/bar/

And see if you can get it running on Mono. Then, see if you can get your
thing to compile that for the MS platform.

Feel free to bounce ideas off of us, and good luck!

-- Ben