2014.2.0.0: 64-bit GHC 7.8.3 under Windows 7 hangs during regex matching

[adubovik]

The following code hangs 64-bit ghc 7.8.3 (as well as ghci) under Windows 7:

import Text.Regex
main = print $ matchRegex (mkRegex "^[ ]*ab[ ]*xy[ ]*(.*)[ ]*") "abxy z"

It works fine at 64-bit Ubuntu and 32-bit Windows XP though.

[23Skidoo]

You'll likely get a better response if you report this issue at the GHC bug tracker.

[adubovik]

I'll try to report this at GHC tracker. The hang is caused by regex-posix package, which is part of additional set of libraries provided by the Platform, so I thought it would be appropriate to ask here.

Turned out there are already a few (closed though) tickets related to hangs and segfaults provoked by the package.

Under Windows regex-posix is built from C sources which come with the package. Seemingly this C code wasn't properly ported to 64-bit architecture.

[23Skidoo]

You may also want to report this to the maintainer of regex-posix.

[gbaz]

@adubovik did you find a way to report this or follow up with the regex-posix maintainer?

[randen]

(It is still failing in the 7.10.3 rc3 candidate)

[adubovik]

@gbaz I didn't. I've switched to regex-tdfa, which doesn't depend on C sources and works just fine.

[gbaz]

@adubovik thanks for the update. I think long-term if the platform is going to provide a regex package, it should be one of the tdfa ones, but that's a further discussion :-).