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authorDaniel Baumann <daniel.baumann@progress-linux.org>2024-04-17 12:02:58 +0000
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Adding upstream version 1.64.0+dfsg1.upstream/1.64.0+dfsg1
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+Your friendly guide to understanding the performance characteristics of this
+crate.
+
+This guide assumes some familiarity with the public API of this crate, which
+can be found here: https://docs.rs/regex
+
+## Theory vs. Practice
+
+One of the design goals of this crate is to provide worst case linear time
+behavior with respect to the text searched using finite state automata. This
+means that, *in theory*, the performance of this crate is much better than most
+regex implementations, which typically use backtracking which has worst case
+exponential time.
+
+For example, try opening a Python interpreter and typing this:
+
+ >>> import re
+ >>> re.search('(a*)*c', 'a' * 30).span()
+
+I'll wait.
+
+At some point, you'll figure out that it won't terminate any time soon. ^C it.
+
+The promise of this crate is that *this pathological behavior can't happen*.
+
+With that said, just because we have protected ourselves against worst case
+exponential behavior doesn't mean we are immune from large constant factors
+or places where the current regex engine isn't quite optimal. This guide will
+detail those cases and provide guidance on how to avoid them, among other
+bits of general advice.
+
+## Thou Shalt Not Compile Regular Expressions In A Loop
+
+**Advice**: Use `lazy_static` to amortize the cost of `Regex` compilation.
+
+Don't do it unless you really don't mind paying for it. Compiling a regular
+expression in this crate is quite expensive. It is conceivable that it may get
+faster some day, but I wouldn't hold out hope for, say, an order of magnitude
+improvement. In particular, compilation can take any where from a few dozen
+microseconds to a few dozen milliseconds. Yes, milliseconds. Unicode character
+classes, in particular, have the largest impact on compilation performance. At
+the time of writing, for example, `\pL{100}` takes around 44ms to compile. This
+is because `\pL` corresponds to every letter in Unicode and compilation must
+turn it into a proper automaton that decodes a subset of UTF-8 which
+corresponds to those letters. Compilation also spends some cycles shrinking the
+size of the automaton.
+
+This means that in order to realize efficient regex matching, one must
+*amortize the cost of compilation*. Trivially, if a call to `is_match` is
+inside a loop, then make sure your call to `Regex::new` is *outside* that loop.
+
+In many programming languages, regular expressions can be conveniently defined
+and compiled in a global scope, and code can reach out and use them as if
+they were global static variables. In Rust, there is really no concept of
+life-before-main, and therefore, one cannot utter this:
+
+ static MY_REGEX: Regex = Regex::new("...").unwrap();
+
+Unfortunately, this would seem to imply that one must pass `Regex` objects
+around to everywhere they are used, which can be especially painful depending
+on how your program is structured. Thankfully, the
+[`lazy_static`](https://crates.io/crates/lazy_static)
+crate provides an answer that works well:
+
+ use lazy_static::lazy_static;
+ use regex::Regex;
+
+ fn some_helper_function(text: &str) -> bool {
+ lazy_static! {
+ static ref MY_REGEX: Regex = Regex::new("...").unwrap();
+ }
+ MY_REGEX.is_match(text)
+ }
+
+In other words, the `lazy_static!` macro enables us to define a `Regex` *as if*
+it were a global static value. What is actually happening under the covers is
+that the code inside the macro (i.e., `Regex::new(...)`) is run on *first use*
+of `MY_REGEX` via a `Deref` impl. The implementation is admittedly magical, but
+it's self contained and everything works exactly as you expect. In particular,
+`MY_REGEX` can be used from multiple threads without wrapping it in an `Arc` or
+a `Mutex`. On that note...
+
+## Using a regex from multiple threads
+
+**Advice**: The performance impact from using a `Regex` from multiple threads
+is likely negligible. If necessary, clone the `Regex` so that each thread gets
+its own copy. Cloning a regex does not incur any additional memory overhead
+than what would be used by using a `Regex` from multiple threads
+simultaneously. *Its only cost is ergonomics.*
+
+It is supported and encouraged to define your regexes using `lazy_static!` as
+if they were global static values, and then use them to search text from
+multiple threads simultaneously.
+
+One might imagine that this is possible because a `Regex` represents a
+*compiled* program, so that any allocation or mutation is already done, and is
+therefore read-only. Unfortunately, this is not true. Each type of search
+strategy in this crate requires some kind of mutable scratch space to use
+*during search*. For example, when executing a DFA, its states are computed
+lazily and reused on subsequent searches. Those states go into that mutable
+scratch space.
+
+The mutable scratch space is an implementation detail, and in general, its
+mutation should not be observable from users of this crate. Therefore, it uses
+interior mutability. This implies that `Regex` can either only be used from one
+thread, or it must do some sort of synchronization. Either choice is
+reasonable, but this crate chooses the latter, in particular because it is
+ergonomic and makes use with `lazy_static!` straight forward.
+
+Synchronization implies *some* amount of overhead. When a `Regex` is used from
+a single thread, this overhead is negligible. When a `Regex` is used from
+multiple threads simultaneously, it is possible for the overhead of
+synchronization from contention to impact performance. The specific cases where
+contention may happen is if you are calling any of these methods repeatedly
+from multiple threads simultaneously:
+
+* shortest_match
+* is_match
+* find
+* captures
+
+In particular, every invocation of one of these methods must synchronize with
+other threads to retrieve its mutable scratch space before searching can start.
+If, however, you are using one of these methods:
+
+* find_iter
+* captures_iter
+
+Then you may not suffer from contention since the cost of synchronization is
+amortized on *construction of the iterator*. That is, the mutable scratch space
+is obtained when the iterator is created and retained throughout its lifetime.
+
+## Only ask for what you need
+
+**Advice**: Prefer in this order: `is_match`, `find`, `captures`.
+
+There are three primary search methods on a `Regex`:
+
+* is_match
+* find
+* captures
+
+In general, these are ordered from fastest to slowest.
+
+`is_match` is fastest because it doesn't actually need to find the start or the
+end of the leftmost-first match. It can quit immediately after it knows there
+is a match. For example, given the regex `a+` and the haystack, `aaaaa`, the
+search will quit after examining the first byte.
+
+In contrast, `find` must return both the start and end location of the
+leftmost-first match. It can use the DFA matcher for this, but must run it
+forwards once to find the end of the match *and then run it backwards* to find
+the start of the match. The two scans and the cost of finding the real end of
+the leftmost-first match make this more expensive than `is_match`.
+
+`captures` is the most expensive of them all because it must do what `find`
+does, and then run either the bounded backtracker or the Pike VM to fill in the
+capture group locations. Both of these are simulations of an NFA, which must
+spend a lot of time shuffling states around. The DFA limits the performance hit
+somewhat by restricting the amount of text that must be searched via an NFA
+simulation.
+
+One other method not mentioned is `shortest_match`. This method has precisely
+the same performance characteristics as `is_match`, except it will return the
+end location of when it discovered a match. For example, given the regex `a+`
+and the haystack `aaaaa`, `shortest_match` may return `1` as opposed to `5`,
+the latter of which being the correct end location of the leftmost-first match.
+
+## Literals in your regex may make it faster
+
+**Advice**: Literals can reduce the work that the regex engine needs to do. Use
+them if you can, especially as prefixes.
+
+In particular, if your regex starts with a prefix literal, the prefix is
+quickly searched before entering the (much slower) regex engine. For example,
+given the regex `foo\w+`, the literal `foo` will be searched for using
+Boyer-Moore. If there's no match, then no regex engine is ever used. Only when
+there's a match is the regex engine invoked at the location of the match, which
+effectively permits the regex engine to skip large portions of a haystack.
+If a regex is comprised entirely of literals (possibly more than one), then
+it's possible that the regex engine can be avoided entirely even when there's a
+match.
+
+When one literal is found, Boyer-Moore is used. When multiple literals are
+found, then an optimized version of Aho-Corasick is used.
+
+This optimization is in particular extended quite a bit in this crate. Here are
+a few examples of regexes that get literal prefixes detected:
+
+* `(foo|bar)` detects `foo` and `bar`
+* `(a|b)c` detects `ac` and `bc`
+* `[ab]foo[yz]` detects `afooy`, `afooz`, `bfooy` and `bfooz`
+* `a?b` detects `a` and `b`
+* `a*b` detects `a` and `b`
+* `(ab){3,6}` detects `ababab`
+
+Literals in anchored regexes can also be used for detecting non-matches very
+quickly. For example, `^foo\w+` and `\w+foo$` may be able to detect a non-match
+just by examining the first (or last) three bytes of the haystack.
+
+## Unicode word boundaries may prevent the DFA from being used
+
+**Advice**: In most cases, `\b` should work well. If not, use `(?-u:\b)`
+instead of `\b` if you care about consistent performance more than correctness.
+
+It's a sad state of the current implementation. At the moment, the DFA will try
+to interpret Unicode word boundaries as if they were ASCII word boundaries.
+If the DFA comes across any non-ASCII byte, it will quit and fall back to an
+alternative matching engine that can handle Unicode word boundaries correctly.
+The alternate matching engine is generally quite a bit slower (perhaps by an
+order of magnitude). If necessary, this can be ameliorated in two ways.
+
+The first way is to add some number of literal prefixes to your regular
+expression. Even though the DFA may not be used, specialized routines will
+still kick in to find prefix literals quickly, which limits how much work the
+NFA simulation will need to do.
+
+The second way is to give up on Unicode and use an ASCII word boundary instead.
+One can use an ASCII word boundary by disabling Unicode support. That is,
+instead of using `\b`, use `(?-u:\b)`. Namely, given the regex `\b.+\b`, it
+can be transformed into a regex that uses the DFA with `(?-u:\b).+(?-u:\b)`. It
+is important to limit the scope of disabling the `u` flag, since it might lead
+to a syntax error if the regex could match arbitrary bytes. For example, if one
+wrote `(?-u)\b.+\b`, then a syntax error would be returned because `.` matches
+any *byte* when the Unicode flag is disabled.
+
+The second way isn't appreciably different than just using a Unicode word
+boundary in the first place, since the DFA will speculatively interpret it as
+an ASCII word boundary anyway. The key difference is that if an ASCII word
+boundary is used explicitly, then the DFA won't quit in the presence of
+non-ASCII UTF-8 bytes. This results in giving up correctness in exchange for
+more consistent performance.
+
+N.B. When using `bytes::Regex`, Unicode support is disabled by default, so one
+can simply write `\b` to get an ASCII word boundary.
+
+## Excessive counting can lead to exponential state blow up in the DFA
+
+**Advice**: Don't write regexes that cause DFA state blow up if you care about
+match performance.
+
+Wait, didn't I say that this crate guards against exponential worst cases?
+Well, it turns out that the process of converting an NFA to a DFA can lead to
+an exponential blow up in the number of states. This crate specifically guards
+against exponential blow up by doing two things:
+
+1. The DFA is computed lazily. That is, a state in the DFA only exists in
+ memory if it is visited. In particular, the lazy DFA guarantees that *at
+ most* one state is created for every byte of input. This, on its own,
+ guarantees linear time complexity.
+2. Of course, creating a new state for *every* byte of input means that search
+ will go incredibly slow because of very large constant factors. On top of
+ that, creating a state for every byte in a large haystack could result in
+ exorbitant memory usage. To ameliorate this, the DFA bounds the number of
+ states it can store. Once it reaches its limit, it flushes its cache. This
+ prevents reuse of states that it already computed. If the cache is flushed
+ too frequently, then the DFA will give up and execution will fall back to
+ one of the NFA simulations.
+
+In effect, this crate will detect exponential state blow up and fall back to
+a search routine with fixed memory requirements. This does, however, mean that
+searching will be much slower than one might expect. Regexes that rely on
+counting in particular are strong aggravators of this behavior. For example,
+matching `[01]*1[01]{20}$` against a random sequence of `0`s and `1`s.
+
+In the future, it may be possible to increase the bound that the DFA uses,
+which would allow the caller to choose how much memory they're willing to
+spend.
+
+## Resist the temptation to "optimize" regexes
+
+**Advice**: This ain't a backtracking engine.
+
+An entire book was written on how to optimize Perl-style regular expressions.
+Most of those techniques are not applicable for this library. For example,
+there is no problem with using non-greedy matching or having lots of
+alternations in your regex.