One of the new features in the most recent dev-channel release of Google Chrome (2.0.160.0) is Irregexp, a completely new implementation of regular expressions (regexps) in the V8 JavaScript engine. Irregexp builds on V8's existing infrastructure for memory management and native code generation and is tailored to work well for the kinds of regexps used by JavaScript programs on the web. The result is a considerable improvement in V8's regexp performance.

While the V8 team has been working hard to improve JavaScript performance, one part of the language that we have so far not given much attention is regexps. Our previous implementation was based on the widely used PCRE library developed by Philip Hazel at the University of Cambridge. The version we used, known as JSCRE, was adapted and improved by the WebKit project for use with JavaScript. Using JSCRE gave us a regular expression implementation that was compatible with industry standards and has served us well. However, as we've improved other parts of the language, regexps started to stand out as being slower than the rest. We felt it should be possible to improve performance by integrating with our existing infrastructure rather than using an external library. The SquirrelFish team is following a similar approach with their JavaScript engine.

A fundamental decision we made early in the design of Irregexp was that we would be willing to spend extra time compiling a regular expression if that would make running it faster. During compilation Irregexp first converts a regexp into an intermediate automaton representation. This is in many ways the "natural" and most accessible representation and makes it much easier to analyze and optimize the regexp. For instance, when compiling /Sun|Mon/ the automaton representation lets us recognize that both alternatives have an 'n' as their third character. We can quickly scan the input until we find an 'n' and then start to match the regexp two characters earlier. Irregexp looks up to four characters ahead and matches up to four characters at a time.

After optimization we generate native machine code which uses backtracking to try different alternatives. Backtracking can be time-consuming so we use optimizations to avoid as much of it as we can. There are techniques to avoid backtracking altogether but the nature of regexps in JavaScript makes it difficult to apply them in our case, though it is something we may implement in the future.

During development we have tested Irregexp against one million of the most popular webpages to ensure that the new implementation stays compatible with our previous implementation and the web. We have also used this data to create a new benchmark which is included in version 3 of the V8 Benchmark Suite. We feel this is a good reflection of what is found on the web.

If you want to try this out, and help us test it in the process, you can subscribe to the dev-channel and if you see problems that might be related to Irregexp consider filing a bug.

And BTW, we'll have sessions on V8 and other Chrome-related topics in May at Google I/O, Google's largest developer conference.

Posted by Erik Corry, Christian Plesner Hansen and Lasse Reichstein Holst Nielsen, Software Engineers