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Just-in-time compiling is a heavyweight optimization that can greatly speed up pattern matching. However, it comes at the cost of extra processing before the match is performed. Therefore, it is of most benefit when the same pattern is going to be matched many times. This does not necessarily mean many calls of a matching function; if the pattern is not anchored, matching attempts may take place many times at various positions in the subject, even for a single call. Therefore, if the subject string is very long, it may still pay to use JIT for one-off matches.
JIT support applies only to the traditional Perl-compatible matching function. It does not apply when the DFA matching function is being used. The code for this support was written by Zoltan Herczeg.
JIT support is available for all of the 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit PCRE libraries. To keep this documentation simple, only the 8-bit interface is described in what follows. If you are using the 16-bit library, substitute the 16-bit functions and 16-bit structures (for example, pcre16_jit_stack instead of pcre_jit_stack). If you are using the 32-bit library, substitute the 32-bit functions and 32-bit structures (for example, pcre32_jit_stack instead of pcre_jit_stack).
JIT support is an optional feature of PCRE. The "configure" option --enable-jit (or equivalent CMake option) must be set when PCRE is built if you want to use JIT. The support is limited to the following hardware platforms:
ARM v5, v7, and Thumb2 Intel x86 32-bit and 64-bit MIPS 32-bit Power PC 32-bit and 64-bit SPARC 32-bit (experimental)If --enable-jit is set on an unsupported platform, compilation fails.
A program that is linked with PCRE 8.20 or later can tell if JIT support is available by calling pcre_config() with the PCRE_CONFIG_JIT option. The result is 1 when JIT is available, and 0 otherwise. However, a simple program does not need to check this in order to use JIT. The normal API is implemented in a way that falls back to the interpretive code if JIT is not available. For programs that need the best possible performance, there is also a "fast path" API that is JIT-specific.
If your program may sometimes be linked with versions of PCRE that are older than 8.20, but you want to use JIT when it is available, you can test the values of PCRE_MAJOR and PCRE_MINOR, or the existence of a JIT macro such as PCRE_CONFIG_JIT, for com