Stack overflow during std::regex_replace - c++

Question

I'm trying to execute the following C++ STL-based code to replace text in a relatively large SQL script (~8MB):
std::basic_regex<TCHAR> reProc("^[ \t]*create[ \t]+(view|procedure|proc)+[ \t]+(.+)$\n((^(?![ \t]*go[ \t]*).*$\n)+)^[ \t]*go[ \t]*$");
std::basic_string<TCHAR> replace = _T("ALTER $1 $2\n$3\ngo");
return std::regex_replace(strInput, reProc, replace);
The result is a stack overflow, and it's hard to find information about that particular error on this particular site since that's also the name of the site.
Edit: I am using Visual Studio 2013 Update 5
Edit 2: The original file is over 23,000 lines. I cut the file down to 3,500 lines and still get the error. When I cut it by another ~50 lines down to 3,456 lines, the error goes away. If I put just those cut lines into the file, the error is still gone. This suggests that the error is not related to specific text, but just too much of it.
Edit 3: A full working example is demonstrated operating properly here:
https://regex101.com/r/iD1zY6/1
It doesn't work in that STL code, though.

Answer 1

The following trimmed-down version of your regex saves about 20% of processing steps according to regex101 (see here).
\\bcreate[ \t]+(view|procedure|proc)[ \t]+(.+)\n(((?![ \t]*go[ \t]*).*\n)+)[ \t]*go[ \t]*
Modifications:
inline anchors removed: you are expressly testing for newline characters
repetition operator for the db object keywords removed - a repetition at this point would make the original script syntactically invalid.
initial whitespace pattern replaced by word boundary (note the double backslash - the escape sequence is for the regex engine, not for the compiler)
If you can be sure that ...
the create ... statements do not occur in string literals, and
you do not need to distinguish between create ... statements followed by a go or not (eg. because all statements are trailed by a go)
...it might even be easier to just replace these strings:
std::basic_regex<TCHAR> reProc("\bcreate[ \t]+(view|procedure|proc)");
std::basic_string<TCHAR> replace = _T("ALTER $1");
return std::regex_replace(strInput, reProc, replace);
(Here is a demo for the latter approach - reduces the steps to a little more than 1/4 th).

Answer 2

It turns out that STL regular expressions are tragic under-performers versus Perl (about 100 times slower if you can believe https://stackoverflow.com/a/37016671/78162), so it's apparently necessary to absolutely minimize the use of regular expressions in STL/C++ when performance is a serious concern. (The degree to which C++/STL under-performs here blew my mind considering I presume C++ to generally be one of the more performant languages). I ended up passing the file stream to read one line at a time and only run the expression on lines that needed processing like this:
std::basic_string<TCHAR> result;
std::basic_string<TCHAR> line;
std::basic_regex<TCHAR> reProc(_T("^[ \t]*create[ \t]+(view|procedure|proc)+[ \t]+(.+)$"), std::regex::optimize);
std::basic_string<TCHAR> replace = _T("ALTER $1 $2");
do {
std::getline(input, line);
int pos = line.find_first_not_of(_T(" \t"));
if ((pos != std::basic_string<TCHAR>::npos)
&& (_tcsnicmp(line.substr(pos, 6).data(), _T("create"), 6)==0))
result.append(std::regex_replace(line, reProc, replace));
else
result.append(line);
result.append(_T("\n"));
} while (!input.eof());
return result;