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.

NVIDIA Announces CEO Transition

Anthropic IPO

Abandoned Quake 4 expansion finished by modders and now playable

I'm making LLMs work on small and old devices

Talking Zen 6 with Mike Clark at AMD In-Depth

ExcalidrawZ: Local Native Excalidraw on macOS/iOS

Why Writing Correct Software Is Hard

Libreagi – Save OSS Models

Running web sites makes me not want to

Fitting Four 32 GB Resizable Bars Behind a PCIe Switch on Linux

Nintendo Takes Down Emulators and Firmware in Massive GitHub DMCA Sweep

Socratic Tutor

AWS Lambda Web Functions keep billing memory ~7 minutes after the last request

Paths in Pieces

Electric Ship Batteries Promise Compact, Cooler Power

A live tree of systemd jobs on the boot console

Researchers discover rare star system that emits radio signals every 8 minutes

93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs (2019)

Decoding REXPaint Files in Odin

Pulling the Lever in a Subway Problem

Critical RCE Vulnerability in Apache HTTP Server

Creating Worlds: Runes and Spells Prototype

AWS emulator

Making a €40 USB-C hub work as a Nintendo Switch 2 dock

Show HN: AI Red Lines – write down what would make you act on AI

Show HN: Build a PC in 3D in the Browser

Research taste in history: the importance of learning Babylonian math

A false smoke alarm almost drowned Jane Street's only NYC datacenter

Show HN: Fable52.games – Play and inspect Fable 5.2 single-file HTML games

Gemini Decisions API