(Sorry about my previous "do I need to subscribe?" email; in retrospect that was needless noise.) The purpose of this email is twofold: first, inquire about the status of ticket filed a few years ago, and second to point out some non-obvious reasons why it might be slightly more serious than it seems. The ticket is this one https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8260866 (stack overflow in regex matching quantified alternation) The priority is listed as P4, which I guess means something like "medium" (more important than p5, but less than p3) It also has a specific person assigned, which seems vaguely encouraging, but no updates at all in the years since it's been created, which seems less encouraging. It was seemingly never once discussed on this mailing list, not even when it was first filed. As an outsider, I'm not quite sure how to interpret all these various omens and turn them into guesses about its eventual fate. Will it remain unfixed for another decade or two? Will it be fixed in a few months, but then never backported to old versions? Something else? No one knows?
That concludes the status inquiry. Now on to the advocacy. Some bugs are annoying, but once you hit them, you can work around them by changing your code so it does not trigger the bug. Note the phrase "your code" above. This is much more awkward to do if the bug triggered by third-party code you got from maven central or something. At that point your options are to either ask the third party library to work around it, or else fork the dependency (which is not well supported by mainstream build tools (or maybe I'm just using them wrong)). In this case, regular expressions are so ubiquitous that the bug is quite plausibly more likely to be triggered by some third party dependency than by code you own. That was the case for me today: after spending hours trying to track down a stack overflow error I found the offending regex in a third party library. The good news is that for the kinds of inputs we need to handle, it is indeed easy to substitute a much simpler regex that would avoid the issue. The bad news is that it's not my code, so I can't. I could petition the maintainers of the library, but this is not great because: First, maybe the version I'm on is not longer even supported, and newer versions are not compatible, Second, it may take them a while to fix it, and third, it is wasteful (and inelegant) to have workarounds slowly percolate throughout the Java ecosystem instead of fixing the problem at the root. The other annoying thing here is that even when you have "enough" stack space to avoid crashing, using it may not be quite "free". For instance, project loom's foundational premise seems to be that "most threads have oversized stacks; we can have more threads if we start off with small stacks and grow them only when needed". This would be false when the thread in question uses a regex with quantified alternation. (Since many Loom threads will be based on the same Runnable, it's a pretty safe bet that if one of them uses this feature, many will, so you can't assume it will "average out".) There are other reasons besides loom to be low on stack space; maybe you're using some crazy framework(s) that like(s) to have call stacks that are crazy deep. Or maybe you're running with -Xss set pretty low. Or you passed a small value for stack space to the Thread constructor. Or maybe none of these things are true, but in most operating systems a thread stack costs "real" memory in proportion to its high-watermark, so even a SINGLE heavy regex in the lifetime of a thread is tantamount to a memory leak of hundreds of kilobytes. Practicalities aside, I don't like it when code consumes "surprising" types of resources, or surprising amounts of them. For instance, you wouldn't expect a sorting function to spawn threads behind your back, unless it was called "parallel sort" or something like that. You wouldn't expect it to allocate multi-gigabyte arrays, nor to perform I/O. Similarly, most functions need only O(1) stack space, so this tends to be the default assumption unless the docs explicitly call out "this thing might throw stack overflows at you so make sure you have plenty of stack space" Some need a bit more... for instance, I would not be surprised if a regex need stack space in proportion to the depth of the parse tree of the regex. But stack space in proportion to the length of the string being matched is the kind of thing that I'd hope gets called out in those @implNotes thingies, or better yet fixed. Even people who know that regex matching can sometimes take exponential time may naively assume that regex matching would not consume O(n) stack space, where n is the input length. What's worse, not only does it indeed consume stack space linear in the length of the input, but the constant hidden by the O() notation is itself pretty scary. For instance, consider the regex that caused my troubles today: https://github.com/apache/camel/blob/main/core/camel-support/src/main/java/org/apache/camel/support/ObjectHelper.java#L63 After getting rid of extra escaping and also double-escaping caused by java not having "raw" strings, we're left with this: ,(?!(?:[^(,]|[^)],[^)])+\)) (I find the above hard to read; the regex I would have replaced it with, if it had been "our" code is simply a single comma.) Anyway, I tried creating a Scanner with the delimiter above and looping through all the tokens in the string that originally caused the crash. I thought that perhaps it would work, since I had a simple example that does everything in main, but it also crashed. Then I decided to play an alternating game where I trimmed the string until it stopped crashing, then lowered Xss by 64k and repeated. Eventually, I got it crashing with a call stack well over 500 calls deep on a string less than a 128 characters long. (The string was not hand-crafted; it was simply a prefix of the original string that caused the first crash I tracked down.) The string in question had a mere five tokens, which is to say that it had just four commas. It had no open or close parenthesis, so the entire negative lookahead assertion served as a giant no-op, at least when it wasn't crashing. (Technically, the stack usage is linear in the length of the input AFTER the first comma, but the first comma was pretty early.) Sorry if this email is poorly organized; I've already spent way too many hours on it (not even counting the debugging that prompted it) and I need to get some sleep now. If anyone actually reads all or most of this, thank you. Mark. P.S. if anyone actually responds, thank you even more. This message is for information purposes only. It is not a recommendation, advice, offer or solicitation to buy or sell a product or service, nor an official confirmation of any transaction. 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