ERTS are still compiled against PCRE, which happens to be unmaintained for almost 9 years already. While OTP keeps their own copy of the PCRE it do not see much traffic and wasn’t even updated to last PCRE release (ERTS uses 8.33 while 8.36 is the last PCRE release).
I think it is a time to consider long-term solutions we face to keep that code relevant:
- Migrate to PCRE2 which also is currently looking for long-term maintainer
- Migrate to another regex engine like Oniguruma
First solution has an obvious advantage that it should be more compatible with current regexes in existing Erlang code, but due to Phillip Hazel retirement, the future of this project is not obvious.
Second solution has an advantage of using engine with larger set of maintainers and/or using faster implementation of regexes, but at cost of potential large scale breaking change.
So there is field for discussion how to takle this problem there, but it is something that should be discussed now to set up a plan for future migration.