Re: Regular expression performance in emacs, number of cached regexps

[Dale Hagglund <rdh@best.com>]

Maybe adding a new function along the lines of

	(re-compile REGEXP)

that returns a compiled form of REGEXP would be a useful approach.
Along with this, all the various regexp search functions could check
if they're given a compiled or an uncompiled regexp, and either check
the cache and compile if necessary, or just use the given compiled
form.

This would let authors of regexp-heavy code pre-compile their own
regexps, avoiding the entire issue of cache size.  The down-side of
this is that over-zealous use of this could chew quite a bit of space
in compiled regexps.

Is there some reason why this sort of approach is a bad idea?  I've
used emacs extensively for many years, and written a fair amount of
lisp code, but I'm only looked at the C internals a few times.

Dale.