Thanks for the kind words about Hyperscan. If you'd like to talk more, please get in contact (via the list, via our support alias, or our emails if you have them already).
I'm curious about the design issues w.r.t callbacks. We certainly haven't had complaints from most of our users about this, but maybe there would have been better models. Note that callbacks are partly a design pattern for our convenience - we need those big, complex stack frames for many of our engines. It's nice to throw a match out of the middle of a big unrolled loop and know that we can come back to the middle of the loop - not into the tedious 'preconditioning and warmup' part of the loop.
An alternate design is to fill a buffer of matches, but that has its own issues, especially with timeliness. Some users want to stop matching quickly after the first match - a problem if we go off and scan another megabyte to get the second through Nth matches.
In any case, we're always interested to hear about cases where we aren't the best solution, as this is always the most productive type of feedback to get. "Your library is great and you guys are really smart" is gratifying, but it doesn't lend itself well to continuous improvement.
I'm curious about the design issues w.r.t callbacks. We certainly haven't had complaints from most of our users about this, but maybe there would have been better models. Note that callbacks are partly a design pattern for our convenience - we need those big, complex stack frames for many of our engines. It's nice to throw a match out of the middle of a big unrolled loop and know that we can come back to the middle of the loop - not into the tedious 'preconditioning and warmup' part of the loop.
An alternate design is to fill a buffer of matches, but that has its own issues, especially with timeliness. Some users want to stop matching quickly after the first match - a problem if we go off and scan another megabyte to get the second through Nth matches.
In any case, we're always interested to hear about cases where we aren't the best solution, as this is always the most productive type of feedback to get. "Your library is great and you guys are really smart" is gratifying, but it doesn't lend itself well to continuous improvement.