Hi, I'm a student interested in this GSoC project. I already participated in GSoC several times, one of those involved porting the TRE regex engine to FreeBSD. I also worked on some optimizations for that. Since then I've started the PhD course in modeling and domain-specific languages, which made me more familiar with the theory of parsing and automata. I'm experienced in C and I can get along with C++. I'd like to ask what are the exact requirements of this project? Is it about plugging in an existing regexp engine into MariaDB, like RE2 or TRE? Or writing a new implementation? Could you please give me some pointers where to look at the code to see how regexes are used in MariaDB? Also, what other preliminary research should I do to write a good application? Thanks in advance, Gábor