# Russ Cox Russ Cox is an American software engineer and computer scientist, long associated with Google, where he led the [[Go]] programming language team for many years. Within the regex world he is widely known for his article series "Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast", which explains why automata-based (Thompson NFA) matching runs in linear time while backtracking engines can blow up exponentially on adversarial input. He is the author of RE2, the automata-based regular expression library that powers regex matching in Go and other Google systems without the catastrophic-backtracking risk of PCRE-style engines. He holds a PhD from MIT and publishes technical writing at swtch.com. ## Related - [[Regular Expressions (Regex)]] ## Quotes <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/quote AND [[Russ Cox]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> ## Books <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #books AND [[Russ Cox]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC -->