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.

Bun's experimental Rust rewrite hits 99.8% test compatibility on Linux x64 glibc

Internet Archive Switzerland

Zed Editor Theme-Builder

I’ve banned query strings

CPanel's Black Week: 3 New Vulnerabilities Patched After Attack on 44k Servers

Production engineering when trading billions of dollars a day [video]

Show HN: I wrote a flight simulator in my own programming language

Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels

Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users

LLMs corrupt your documents when you delegate

"Dirty Frag" (CVE-2026-43284): The Second Linux Root Exploit in Eight Days

Meta's Embrace of A.I. Is Making Its Employees Miserable

PipeDream on the Acorn Archimedes

The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

The ROKR wooden typewriter: a closer look

How LEDs are made (2014)

A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

Mythical Man Month

OpenAI’s WebRTC problem

America's carpet capital: an empire and its toxic legacy

GrapheneOS fixes Android VPN leak Google refused to patch

David Attenborough's 100th Birthday

Introduction to Beaver Triples

Building the TD4 4-Bit CPU

What causes lightning? The answer keeps getting more interesting

Show HN: Create flashcards with Space CLI

Reviving the IBM Selectric Composer Fonts (2023)

Show HN: Mochi.js: bun-native high-fidelity browser automation library

Wi is Fi: Understanding Wi-Fi 4/5/6/6E/7/8 (802.11 n/AC/ax/be/bn)