Fast(er) regular expression engines in Ruby

https://serpapi.com/blog/faster-regular-expression-engines-in-ruby/

60•davidsojevic•1y ago

Comments

yxhuvud•1y ago

Eww, pretending to support utf8 matchers while not supporting them at all was not pretty to see.

gitroom•1y ago

Honestly that part bugs me, fake support is worse than no support imo

kayodelycaon•1y ago

> Another nuance was found in ruby, which cannot scan the haystack with invalid UTF-8 byte sequences.

This is extremely basic ruby: UTF-8 encoded strings must be valid UTF-8. This is not unique to ruby. If I recall correctly, python 3 does the same thing.

    2.7.1 :001 > haystack = "\xfc\xa1\xa1\xa1\xa1\xa1abc"
    2.7.1 :003 > haystack.force_encoding "ASCII-8BIT"
    => "\xFC\xA1\xA1\xA1\xA1\xA1abc" 
    2.7.1 :004 > haystack.scan(/.+/)
    => ["\xFC\xA1\xA1\xA1\xA1\xA1abc"]

This person is a senior engineer on their Team page. All they had to do was google "ArgumentError: invalid byte sequence in UTF-8". Or ask a coworker... the company has Ruby on Rails applications. headdesk

burntsushi•1y ago

The nuance is specifically relevant here because neither of the other two regex engines benchmarked have this requirement. It's doubly relevant because that means running a regex search doesn't require a UTF-8 validation step, and is therefore likely beneficial from a perf perspective, dependening on the workload.

kayodelycaon•1y ago

That’s a good point. I hadn’t considered it because I’ve hit the validation error long before getting to search. It is possible to avoid string operations with careful coding prior to the search.

Edit: After a little testing, the strings can be read from and written to files without triggering validation. Presumably this applies to sockets as well.

DmitryOlshansky•1y ago

I wonder how std.regex of dlang would fare in such test. Sadly due to a tiny bit of D’s GC use it’s hard to provide as a library for other languages. If there is an interest I might take it through the tests.

Building and Shipping Mac and iOS Apps Without Ever Opening Xcode

Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor

Linux 0.11 rewritten in idiomatic Rust, boots in QEMU

Show HN: YouTube Guitar Tab Parser

The real prices of frontier models. Tokens * Price, right?

Linux on the Sega 32X. Who needs hardware synchronization primitives anyway?

Climate.gov was destroyed. Open data saved it

The art and engineering of Sega CD Silpheed

SalesPatriot (YC W25) Is Hiring Full Stack Engineers (SF)

Telegram's t.me domain has been suspended

Samsung Health app threatens data deletion if users opt out AI training

TFTP Honey Pot Results

Show HN: I implemented a neural network in SQL

Show HN: Jacquard, a programming language for AI-written, human-reviewed code

Ancient Roman Board Game

The Origins of Heikki's Garden of Flowers

The 4-Bitter Lesson: Balancing Stability and Performance in NVFP4 RL

Show HN: Nobie – an Excel-compatible runtime for agents and humans

The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

A voxel Tokyo in real Japan time – ride the Yamanote line and study Japanese

Show HN: BillAI Bass, an AI-Powered Big Mouth Billy Bass Using Strands Agents

Show HN: Sigwire – a live TUI switchboard for every signal on your Linux box

Benchmarking 15 "E-Waste" GPUs with Modern Workloads

Show HN: DOM-docx – HTML to native, editable Word docs (MIT)

Show HN: OpenClawMachines – Extending OpenClaw to the Enterprise

Robust Secret Storage in Networks

LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire

Tune Code Before Your Garbage Collector

GhostLock, a stack-UAF that has existed in all Linux distributions for 15 years

Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)