On Feb 16, 2004, at 4:58 PM, Timothy Rowledge wrote:

> On Feb 16, 2004, at 4:42 PM, Avi Bryant wrote:
>> Sure, but given both options I don't understand the bias towards 
>> using a plugin that depends on an external library.  Except in cases 
>> where it's impossible to get adequate performance in pure Squeak, 
>> shouldn't the bias go the other way?
> My general rule is to go for the way that involves least work. If the 
> case were that using a C pcre library (and by the way, that 32kb 
> plugin size does include the size of the compiled pcre library) and 
> some methods to call it  was available and a 'pure Smalltalk' package 
> was not - I'd go for the former. Somebodyelse did the work, maintains 
> it etc- slamdunk.
>
> In this particular case there _is_ a purely Smalltalk solution that 
> sounds quite plausible. What size does it add to the image? It's 
> probably smaller, but maybe not. What sort of memory usage does it 
> cause in running?

The VB-Regex package is a 120k fileout, the RePlugin is about a 450k 
fileout, FWIW.  Not sure why the RePlugin is so big, it may just have a 
larger test suite.

But here's a more pertinent question - which will handle i17n better?  
Probably neither will out of the box, but which will be more work to 
adapt?  I don't know the answer, though in general I would expect such 
things to be easier when we have Smalltalk code all the way down...

Avi