Fast(er) regular expression engines in Ruby

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

60•davidsojevic•11mo ago

Comments

yxhuvud•11mo ago

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

gitroom•11mo ago

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

kayodelycaon•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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.

My Experience as a Rice Farmer

Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS

Solod – A subset of Go that translates to C

Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates

Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?

Launch HN: Freestyle – Sandboxes for Coding Agents

Apollo Guidance Computer restoration videos

A cryptography engineer's perspective on quantum computing timelines

Three hundred synths, 3 hardware projects, and one app

Peptides: where to begin?

German police name alleged leaders of GandCrab and REvil ransomware groups

Show HN: GovAuctions lets you browse government auctions at once

Some iPhone Apps Receive Mysterious Update 'From Apple'

What being ripped off taught me

AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart

Show HN: Anos – a hand-written ~100KiB microkernel for x86-64 and RISC-V

VOID: Video Object and Interaction Deletion

Anthropic expands partnership with Google and Broadcom for next-gen compute

Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division

Show HN: Hippo, biologically inspired memory for AI agents

Second Revision of 6502 Laptop

Build web apps for smart glasses

The Last Quiet Thing

Sky – an Elm-inspired language that compiles to Go

Show HN: Tusk for macOS and Gnome

HackerRank (YC S11) Is Hiring

Battle for Wesnoth: open-source, turn-based strategy game

Graph-go – zero config, full visibility

Dear Heroku: Uhh What's Going On?

After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)