Posted by melodyogonna 10/28/2025
The problem with applying this technique generally is the amount of code generated. But what if you can optimize that too.. perhaps share the common parts of the AST between the copies of the code that are generated, and overlay the changes with some datastructure.
Yes, that Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.
1987 was the clone, 'flex' :-)
It did "compiling the regex into regular code, which can then be optimized by the compiler" before the C programming language as we know it was created. I think 'lex' was compiling regex to C before the C language even had 'struct' types, 'printf' or 'malloc'.
The other optimization I'd guess at would be to async/thread/process the checking before and after the @ symbol, so they can run in parallel (ish). Extra cpu time, but speed > CPU cycle count for this benchmark.
In the math department, we had a Moodle the students in the first year of my university in Argentina.
When we started like 15 years ago, the emails of the students and TA were evenly split in 30% Gmail, 30% Yahoo!, 30% Hotmail and 10% others (very aproxímate numbers).
Now the students have like 80% Gmail, 10% Live/Outlook/Hotmail and 10% others/Yahoo. Some of the TA are much older, so perhaps "only" 50% use Gmail.
The difference is huge. I blame the mandatory gmail account for the cell phone.
So, checking only @gmail.com is too strict, but a first fast check for @gmail.com and later the complete regex may improve the speed a lot in the real word.
"simply do X" is such a programmer fallacy at this point I'm surprised we don't have a catchy name for it yet, together with a XKCD for making the point extra clear.
The trope is "At Google we..." and then casually mention "violating" the CAP theorum with Spanner or something.
It is simple, and I really do hope any first year CS student could extract a substring from a string. Have LLMs so atrophied our programming ability that extraction of a substring is considered evidence of a superior programmer?