Dev Tools · 21h ago
Doom runs on regex at 3 minutes per frame, 14M substitutions
A developer has ported Doom to run using only regular expressions, achieving 180 seconds per frame. The engine processes nearly 14 million regex substitutions per frame at a rate of 80,000 per second. This technical feat demonstrates extreme optimization and creative use of regex as a computational tool.
Meridian48 take
A clever but impractical hack that showcases the limits of regex as a programming language, more a curiosity than a useful development.
Read the full reporting
Daring coder gets Doom running with regular expressions at 180 seconds per frame, like playing 'correspondence chess with a shotgun' — nearly 14 million substitutions to render a frame at 80,000 substitutions per second →
Tom's Hardware
doomregular-expressions