Why nginx's http parser doesnt use regular expressions?

[anshuk kumar]

This is in reference to the following code

https://github.com/joyent/http-parser

What could be the main reason for such a design decision? I guess I could
write few regular expressions to parse HTTP req & res this would be a lot
less complex than Igor's version of the parser.

What am I missing here?


On some discussion with over nginx's IRC i got the following points

* HTTP parsing requires recursive exp resolution which is not possible
using regexp

* State Machines are faster?

* A tool like ragel is used to create such state machine?
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