The latest thing I’ve been working on has just been announced: irregexp. It’s a new regular expression engine for v8 that we’ve been working on for a few months and now finally it has made it onto the dev-channel release of Google Chrome.
For me an interesting aspect of the irregexp sub-project is that it has taken place completely out in the open. The trail of code and code reviews is out there from the day we created the branch, then known as regexp2000, (599) to we merged back into the mainline (832) to we became feature complete (1104) until finally irregexp could take over all regexp handling (1117). The openness aspect of the v8 project does occasionally freak me out a little bit — almost all the work I do and much of my work-related communication takes place in public and will, barring the cataclysmic destruction of the internet, stay public forever. But in this case I have no reservations, I like the idea very much.
Since it’s been so long since I’ve posted here I have a whole backlog of stuff I’d like to write about but haven’t gotten around to. So to get myself started again here’s what I’ll do: I promise that within a week I will have published a new post. There.