Clarification on Hyperscan’s Dependencies: Ragel, Colm, and Boost

[sdtckr]

Hi Hyperscan team,

According to the documentation, Hyperscan is described as a standalone library. However, during the build process, I noticed dependencies on external libraries such as Ragel, Colm, and Boost.

Could you please clarify the following:

1. Are these dependencies mandatory for all use cases of Hyperscan, or are they only required for specific components or optional features?
2. Why are these external libraries necessary if Hyperscan is supposed to be standalone? Is it possible to build Hyperscan without these dependencies for minimal?

I appreciate your clarification and look forward to any insights you can provide on this matter.

Thanks in advance!

Best regards,
Sedat

[pombredanne]

AFAIK:

• the expression parser is written using Ragel https://github.com/adrian-thurston/ragel
• AFAICR Ragel depends on Colm (from the same author) https://github.com/adrian-thurston/colm
• overall Hyperscan uses Boost

So my take would be: yes you needs these at build time.

Once a shared object is built, these are statically linked inside the .so, so there is no extra runtime dependencies.

[pombredanne]

In all cases Hyperscan is no longer maintained as explained at https://github.com/VectorCamp/vectorscan?tab=readme-ov-file#hyperscan-license-change-after-54 and you should consider using https://github.com/VectorCamp/vectorscan instead