Regular expressions performance: Boost vs. Perl

Question

I\'m looking for a performance comparison between perl and boost regular expression.
I need to design a piece of code which relies very heavily on regular expressions, and c

Answer 1

The startup cost of running a Perl interpreter from within your application (via the system function I presume) will outweigh any benefits you gain over using Perl's regex engine. The exception would be if you have a VERY complicated regular expression that Perl's regex implementation happens to be optimised for but boost's regex engine isn't.

The real answer is that I do not know of any such comparison, but Perl's regular expression facilities are not necessarily the fastest. See here for some information about an algorithm that beats Perl's regular expression for some expressions.

EDIT: It is possible to overcome the startup cost of starting a full perl interpreter by linking to libperl or using libPCRE. And using boost will probably give you more flexibility and performance tuning options if you need them.

Final Note: There are no known direct comparisons between boost.regex and Perl's regex in terms of performance. The solution is to try both and see which is more performant for the OP's specific situation.

(Edit : There is now a good comparison between Boost and PCRE. See http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_41_0/libs/regex/doc/gcc-performance.html)