Is it possible to port GNU grep as a library? [closed]

Question

I would like to know if it is possible to port GNU grep as a libary, leaving aside the legal complications, if any, as this is purely for non-commercial, but academic use. I have seen many ports exist of GNU grep. For example : GNU grep for win 32 here.

I wonder why nobody has ever attempted to port grep as a library ? It would be a huge benefit to applications that exploit string searching/mining as they can use the power of GNU grep internally in the their applications. I would like to attempt this feat, but since I am new to string searching/mining, would love to know the obvious challenges that may arise and why it has not been done as yet.

EDIT - The advantage of a GNU grep library is that it will do string searching much faster, using its own modified version of boyer-moore. Where as when using a regular expression wrapper library such as PCRE or Boost reg exp or Qt Reg expressions etc, the application has to read the file line-by-line and parse each line against the regexp. This is the obvious advantage that I see.

Answer 1

Yes. Just link it as a library and call its main() with its intended arguments. Or better if you rename its main() to some better, f.e. to grep().