Is it possible to use re2 from Python?

[_wolf]

i just discovered http://code.google.com/p/re2, a promising library
that uses a long-neglected way (Thompson NFA) to implement a regular
expression engine that can be orders of magnitudes faster than the
available engines of awk, Perl, or Python.

so i downloaded the code and did the usual sudo make install thing.
however, that action had seemingly done little more than adding /usr/
local/include/re2/re2.h to my system. there seemed to be some `*.a
file in addition, but then what is it with this *.a extension?

i would like to use re2 from Python (preferrably Python 3.1) and was
excited to see files like make_unicode_groups.py in the distro (maybe
just used during the build process?). those however were not deployed
on my machine.

how can i use re2 from Python?

(this message appeared before under
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2439345/is-it-possible-to-use-re2-from-python
and, even earlier, http://groups.google.com/group/re2-dev/t/59b78327ec3cca0a)