We used to draw polygons line by line using fixed point maths to avoid the overhead of using floating point maths, prior to the advent of the maths co-processor or FPU.

These days we direct powerful GPU hardware to draw them for us. There is no way that the algorithms used today could possibly run properly on machines with no GPU, regardless of how well you optimise them. They are far too complex and involve far too much data manipulation.

The same hardware which accelerates graphics rendering is also usable for regex's. And suddenly with that additional piece of hardware being used, regex's are no longer the slow/stupid way of doing things, but infact the smart way of doing things because you have like 512 processors and several gigs of high-speed ram on your side running those regex's at lightening speed behind the scenes.

The more of that work you can shift away from the CPU, the better!

Ps. is it regexes, regex's or regexen? I dunno...

P.P.s I really hope Perl6 will be the first language to fully exploit that fact!

In reply to Re^4: How fast is fast? by Logicus
in thread How fast is fast? by Logicus

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