Microsoft Excel and PCRE2

[Michael Tang]

Hello Dr. Hazel and PCRE2 community!

My name is Michael Tang, and I am a software engineer on the Excel team at Microsoft. Excel recently introduced a few new regular expression functions, and the best part is that these functions are powered by PCRE2! We chose to use PCRE2 over other regular expression engines for its code maturity and wide set of capabilities. We see PCRE2 as an essential library to the success of the new regular expression functions in Excel. 

We would like to help contribute back to the development of PCRE2. And we're curious if members of the community would be interested in a conference call to hear some of Excel's proposals to extend the library? 

For folk who are interested, it would help if you would please fill out the survey below, and we'll send you a follow up email with more details!

Survey: https://forms.office.com/r/iXxC9hwjQZ

We look forward to hearing from you all!

Thanks,

Michael

[Philip Hazel]

Hello Michael,

Thanks for your message. I continue to be amazed at how widely PCRE2 is getting used. Are you aware that I am in the (slow) process of handing over PCRE2 maintenance to others? See a message entitled "Long-term maintenance of PCRE2" in the archive of the Google group. This is happening because I am getting old. :-(  The PCRE2 development community is quite small. A recent addition is Alex Dowad, who should see these messages, and who is rapidly becoming acquainted with the code. He is doing some interesting optimization development. 

A number of possible future developments are already listed as GitHub issues (perhaps you've seen these). Some of them are major, which is why they haven't been worked on. I (and I hope others in the community) will be interested to learn what Excel's thoughts are, so I will fill in your survey. 

Regards,

Philip

[Lukas Javorsky]

Hi Philip,

Off-topic, you mentioned Alex as the new member of the development community, can I ask who else is there? I know there might be a lot of contributors (from GitHub history) but I'm mainly asking about the core ones that would take your place (the ones with the admin privileges).

Thank you so much

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S pozdravom/ Best regards

Lukáš Javorský

Senior Software Engineer, Core service - Databases

Red Hat

Purkyňova 115 (TPB-C)

612 00 Brno - Královo Pole

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[Giuseppe D'Angelo]

Hi,

Indeed, I don't want to sound too alarmist, but PCRE is a core component of the Linux ecosystem. A lot of software depends on it -- by heart, I know about grep, apache, mysql, php, nginx, glib, Qt, git, zsh; surely a awful lot more. Ensuring continuity of and trusted maintenance is very important.

My 2 c,

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[Philip Hazel]

Hi Lukas,

It's a small community; at present only myself and Zoltan have admin privileges. The other recent contributors have been Addison (updating the cluster-fuzz testing regime), Alex (who is getting involved by picking up various development issues), and Carlo, who has been contributing for some time, mostly (I hope you agree with this, Carlo) on code criticism and maintenance of the build systems.

Regards,

Philip

[Lukas Javorsky]

Thank you for the information. Also, thank you for all your (and other contributors') work on pcre2 during all of these years.