Closed two of the three gaps the previous commit's honest self-review
left open (the third, full streaming/bounded-memory input, remains
out of scope for this pass and is still documented as such).
Literal prefilter (regexx.c, pike_find): when the NFA-only Prog's
first instruction is a mandatory OP_CHAR or OP_CLASS, a pattern
beginning with a required literal or class rather than a nullable
loop or a leading assertion, injecting a fresh unanchored start
thread at a position that instruction would reject is certain to die
on the very next pike_step call regardless; checking that identical
condition before injecting rather than after changes nothing about
which threads ever exist, only how much wasted work is done finding
out. This targeted exactly examples/bench_vs_posix.c's worst
regression: the literal-search scenario went from roughly 70x slower
than POSIX <regex.h> (up from roughly 22x before the Pike VM existed)
down to roughly 11x-13x, better than the original pre-Pike-VM number;
number extraction (starts with a class) improved more modestly; a*b
(starts with a nullable loop, structurally unhelped) is unchanged, as
expected. Verified with the full 3,252-case suite, three clean
AddressSanitizer/UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer passes, and a rerun of
the whitebox dual-engine cross-check (24,000 match/fullmatch/search
plus ~2,700 finditer comparisons between the two engines on the same
compiled patterns, zero mismatches).
Memory profiling (concept.md 7.9): Valgrind/Massif on the same
adversarial, prefilter-proof pattern shape (a*b, nullable leading
loop) used for the backtracking engine's own worst case, for a fair
comparison. Peak heap was almost entirely the 10MB input buffer
itself; the Pike VM's own contribution was roughly 12KB, confirming
the design's O(instruction count x group count), input-length-
independent memory bound actually holds for the v1 implementation,
not only on paper. concept.md Section 10's table, which had only a
"not yet profiled" caveat for this row before, is updated with the
measured result.
README.md, docs/API.md, USAGE.md, and bench_vs_posix.c's own printed
summary are updated throughout with the corrected numbers, rather
than left describing the pre-prefilter regression as current.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EjuMk8kY9SDus1wWe2K9xY
retoorandClaude Sonnet 5
5ae68d4ea6