[new product] Adds Oniguruma

[captn3m0]

Found out about Oniguruma today, and think it deserves a page as it was very widely used.

Has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oniguruma

Not trying to add 4.x or older, they were pre-2006.

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43782732
• https://lobste.rs/s/t4oq5z/oniguruma_popular_regex_library_is

[captn3m0]

Tracking some important projects and how they're dealing with it (Mistakes mine)

Project	Links	Notes
bat	issue #3285	Issue open (May 2025) to drop the regex-onig build feature entirely. Currently ships oniguruma as default; fancy-regex is an opt-in feature flag. No action taken yet.
bfs	repo	Depends on oniguruma directly (C library) for -iregex pattern matching. No issue filed; still listed as a required dep in Arch/Gentoo packages as of late 2025.
ghostty	discussion #7375	Active discussion (May 2025) . No decision, but open to PCRE2
jq	issue #3313 PCRE2 PR	Migration issue open (May 2025), no alternative chosen but PCRE2 PR open and likely alternative
php	php-src #18467 · RFC	Used by multibyte (mb) extension. RFC proposes deprecating all mb_ereg* / mb_regex_* / mb_split functions in PHP 8.6 and removing them in PHP 9.0
uutils-coreutils	issue #1145	Oniguruma used in expr for GNU regex syntax (backreferences, etc.). Replacement issue dates to 2018 and was closed; no current tracking issue for the 2025 archival. Still a hard package dependency (Arch, Fedora).

Ruby uses its own fork for quite some time. A lot of other packages depend via https://github.com/trishume/syntect/ ( Rust library for syntax highlighting using Sublime Text syntax definitions. ). It still uses oniguruma but supports a oniguruma-free build-mode that uses fancy-regex instead, starting from 4.0: https://github.com/trishume/syntect/#pure-rust-fancy-regex-mode-without-onig

[captn3m0]

Thanks!