A search for improved performance in regular expressions
Brendan Cody-Kenny, Michael Fenton, Adrian Ronayne, Eoghan Considine, Thomas McGuire, Michael O’Neill · Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference · 2017
The primary aim of automated performance improvement is to reduce the running time of programs while maintaining (or improving on) functionality. In this paper, Genetic Programming is used to find performance improvements in regular expressions for an array of target programs, representing the first application of automated software improvement for run-time performance in the Regular Expression language. This particular problem is interesting as there may be many possible alternative regular expressions which perform the same task while exhibiting subtle differences in performance. A benchmark suite of candidate regular expressions is proposed for improvement. We show that the application of Genetic Programming techniques can result in performance improvements in all cases.