I have been thinking about the java based ruby interpreter project, and I
remember one of my largest issues with java has been its lack of regular
expression support.  Over a year ago, when I ran times of basic regexes in
Perl5 and the best available java regex implementation I could find, the
java version ran 5 times slower, so I ruled out even using regexes in my
performance-sensitive java code.  Since writing a reasonably performing
regex engine in java, if you had to do it from scratch, might be the lion's
share of the work in creating a java based interpreter, I wonder if anyone
on this list has tested a java regex engine recently.  If so:

Did it perform well?

Is it open source and available for a ruby license project?

If no such implementation is available for us, does anyone of the many of us
who would like to participate in a java-based ruby interpreter project feel
comfortable implementing a compatible regex engine that also performs well?

If someone plans to code it in MetaRuby directly in ruby code, could you
prototype it as a sanity check and see if performance would not be so poor
as to render it unusable in code that is at all performance sensitive?

Anyway, I don't mean to cast clouds on the project, I just think this is one
of the most important issues to address.

Wayne