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.

Qwenputer: A functioning, deterministic RISC-V CPU inside Qwen3.5

Why is this fingerprinting script creating bioweapons?

GitLab Security Incident: Attempted Exploitation of CVE-2026-97229

New York Times adds more AI features to its Cooking app. Users aren't thrilled

A Health Update

The first wired XR glasses powered by Android XR

CNC Stone Carving

Gemini 4 Carbon

MicroZig to Adopt Strict No LLM / No AI Policy

StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month

MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch

The Grid, a factory-scale robot in Massachusetts that builds PCBs on demand

Start Doing Graph Theory

Formlabs Studio 1 $699 Resin Printer

Nango (YC W23) Is Hiring Across Eng, FDE, Marketing, DevRel

How we made our MMDB files a 33% smaller

Dayjob: Tax – evaluating AI agents on 50 professional tax assignments

The case of the 9 bit AES key

Why Birds Can Fly over Mount Everest

Image generation has come a long way since August 2022

AlpineBSD

Spiders Spin 'Silk Dope' into Nature's Toughest Material

Apple's git still trusts the compromised eMudhra certificates

Gaussian Splats part 3: There's always a bigger scene

The Agent SDK

Scaling Hierarchical Networks

Show HN: SlideBySide – Present slides without sharing your screen

Leak website releases data on DHS employees

Emacs Turns 50

Oseberg Tapestry Fragments