[Python-ideas] re.compile_lazy - on first use compiled regexes

[Gregory P. Smith]

On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 4:34 PM, Bruce Leban <bruce at leapyear.org> wrote:

>
> On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 4:14 PM, Gregory P. Smith <greg at krypto.org> wrote:
>
>> keep=True defeats the purpose of a caching strategy.  An re.compile call
>> within some code somewhere is typically not in a position to know if it is
>> going to be called a lot.
>>
>> I think the code, as things are now, with dynamic construction at runtime
>> based on a simple test is the best of both worlds to avoid the more
>> complicated cost of calling re.compile and going through its cache logic.
>>  If the caching is ever is improved in the future to be faster, the code
>> can arguably be simplified to use re.search or re.match directly and rely
>> solely on the caching.
>>
>> ie: don't change anything.
>>
>>
> Truth is people are currently doing caching themselves, by compiling and
> then keeping the compiled regex. Saying they're not in a position to know
> whether or not to do that isn't going to change that. Is it worthwhile
> having the regex library facilitate this manual caching?
>

In the absense of profiling numbers showing otherwise, i'd rather see all
forms of manual caching like the conditional checks or a keep=True go away
as it's dirty and encourages premature "optimization".
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