2.0.0: vendored RE2 2023-09-01 & native gems

This is a major new version of re2 which no longer requires the RE2 library to be installed as the latest version (2023-09-01) is now vendored with the gem.

Vendored RE2

Installing the gem will also compile and install RE2 (and its dependency, Abseil). As this can take some time, precompiled native gems are available for the following platforms meaning there’s no need to wait for compilation in the majority of cases:

• aarch64-linux (requires: glibc >= 2.29)
• arm-linux (requires: glibc >= 2.29)
• arm64-darwin
• x64-mingw32 / x64-mingw-ucrt
• x86-linux (requires: glibc >= 2.17)
• x86_64-darwin
• x86_64-linux (requires: glibc >= 2.17)

Breaking changes

Due to a new dependency on MiniPortile2 and the need to include compiled C extensions for every supported version of Ruby in the native gems, this major version drops support for all Ruby versions prior to 2.6.

Opting out of the vendored RE2

To opt out of using the gem’s vendored dependencies and instead rely on the previous behaviour of linking against a system install of RE2, use the --enable-system-libraries option when installing the gem.

Note you’ll also need to use the ruby platform to avoid the native gems either via gem install re2 --platform=ruby -- --enable-system-libraries or Bundler's force_ruby_platform option.

Thanks

This major release would not have happened without @stanhu.