The regex library was largely used for non-critical aspects of the compiler and
various external tooling. The library at this point is duplicated with its
out-of-tree counterpart and as such imposes a bit of a maintenance overhead as
well as compile time hit for the compiler itself.
The last major user of the regex library is the libtest library, using regexes
for filters when running tests. This removal means that the filtering has gone
back to substring matching rather than using regexes.
This pulls all of our long-form documentation into a single document,
nicknamed "the book" and formally titled "The Rust Programming
Language."
A few things motivated this change:
* People knew of The Guide, but not the individual Guides. This merges
them together, helping discoverability.
* You can get all of Rust's longform documentation in one place, which
is nice.
* We now have rustbook in-tree, which can generate this kind of
documentation. While its style is basic, the general idea is much
better: a table of contents on the left-hand side.
* Rather than a almost 10,000-line guide.md, there are now smaller files
per section.
