Refactoring wish list

[mudge]

Following the recent releases of the gem, there are a few things I’d like to clean up/investigate to improve maintainability without changing functionality:

• Remove duplicated logic to look up submatches by index
• Remove duplicated logic to look up submatches by name
• Replace macros (most likely with functions)
• Mark pointers as const where they are unchanged by a function
• Remove unnecessary casting during pointer arithmetic
• Remove use of RUBY_METHOD_FUNC to fix deprecation warnings on modern Rubies
• Explicitly test against C++03
• Use references where possible (specifically NamedCapturingGroups)
• Remove using in favour of explicit namespaces
• Pass cpplint?
• Document match’s behaviour with patterns without submatches
• Mark non-recommended parts of API (mostly from the DCI days)
• Lean on StringPiece’s automatic conversion from char * when looking up submatches by name
• Mark all functions as file static
• Ensure there’s test coverage around features that behave differently across Ruby and re2 versions (e.g. things affected by encoding or bytes vs characters)
• Document commitment to backward compatibility?