[issue31580] Defer compiling regular expressions

[Raymond Hettinger]

Raymond Hettinger added the comment:

ISTM, the whole point is to compile in advance.  When I worked during high frequency trading, that was essential to news trading where you *really* didn't want to pay the compilation cost at the time the regex was used.  This proposal takes away the user's only control over when the regex is compiled. 

FWIW, if a user doesn't explicitly invoke re.compile() and instead uses a straight call to re.search(pattern, s), then the pattern is compiled on first-use and cached for future use.  In other words, we already have a simple and clear way to auto-compile on first use.  I recommend against taking away the only option to specify otherwise.

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nosy: +rhettinger

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue31580>
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