I've had nothing but great experience with F#. If it wasn't associated with Microsoft, it'd be more popular than haskell

Fantastic stuff!

FYI some code snippets are unreadable in 'light mode' ("what substrings does the regex (a|ab)+ match in the following input?")

Obligatory: Hitler reacts to functional programming

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ADqLBc1vFwI

Finally, an article about humans programming some computers. Thank you!

That’s beautiful work. Check out other examples in the interactive web app:

https://ieviev.github.io/resharp-webapp/

Back in the Usenet days, questions came up all the time about matching substrings that do not contain whatever. It’s technically possible without an explicit NOT operator because regular languages are closed under complement — along with union, intersection, Kleene star, etc. — but a bear to get right by hand for even simple cases.

Unbounded lookarounds without performance penalty at search time are an exciting feature too.

The author mentions that they found Mamouras et al. (POPL 2024), but not the associated implementation. While the Rust implementation is not public, a Haskell implementation can be found here: https://github.com/Agnishom/lregex

This is very interesting. I'm a bit skeptical about the benchmarks / performance claims because they seem almost too good to be true but even just the extended operators alone are a nice improvement over existing regex engines.

The post mentions they also have a native library implemented in Rust without dependencies but I couldn't find a link to it. Is that available somewhere? I would love to try it out in some of my projects but I don't use .NET so the NuGET package is of no use to me.

I love regular expression derivatives. One neat thing about regular expression derivatives is they are continuation-passing style for regular expressions. The derivative is "what to do next" after seeing a character, which is the continuation of the re. It's a nice conceptual connection if you're into programming language theory.

Low-key hate the lack of capitalization on the blog, which made me stumble over every sentence start. Great blog post a bit marred by unnecessary divergence from standard written English.