A crate for creating and manipulating deterministic finite automata (DFAs). Currently, the implementation is somewhat biased towards building DFAs from regular expressions.
Regular expression implementations (e.g. rust's regex library) are usually based on non-deterministic finite automata (NFAs). By turning NFAs into DFAs, we can sometimes get a speed boost, at the cost of some compilation time. Preliminary benchmarks show that we can get a 5x improvement over rust's built-in regular expressions for very simple regexes.
Some regex features don't map well to DFAs. Specifically, this crate does not support (nor does it plan to support) lazy repetition or subgroup captures. There are also some whose support is planned, but not implemented (e.g. word boundaries).
regex_dfa currently only works on nightly rust.
regex_dfa is distributed under the MIT license and the Apache license (version 2.0).
See LICENSE-APACHE and LICENSE-MIT for details.