[Returned for Revision] SE-0354: Regex Literals

[ksluder (Kyle Sluder)]

@gwendal.roue

The Swift compiler would be able to provide efficient native code for individual regexes, instead of shipping a regex interpreter in the runtime. This can give tremendous performance gains.

Note that this is not the plan. The immediate plan is to compile all regexes to bytecode at runtime. Future directions include compiling trivial regexes to native code and compiling other regexes to bytecode at compile time, but at no point is it expected that Swift will drop the runtime bytecode interpreter.