Fast(er) regular expression engines in Ruby

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

60•davidsojevic•7mo ago

Comments

yxhuvud•7mo ago

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

gitroom•7mo ago

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

kayodelycaon•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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.

Adobe Photoshop 1.0 Source Code (1990)

Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18

Font with Built-In Syntax Highlighting (2024)

Show HN: CineCLI – Browse and torrent movies directly from your terminal

Carnap – A formal logic framework for Haskell

Snitch – A friendlier ss/netstat

It's Always TCP_NODELAY

The Illustrated Transformer

What Is (AI) Glaze?

The Polyglot NixOS

Ultrasound Cancer Treatment: Sound Waves Fight Tumors

GLM-4.7: Advancing the Coding Capability

Claude Code gets native LSP support

10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13

NIST was 5 μs off UTC after last week's power cut

Our New Sam Audio Model Transforms Audio Editing

The Duodecimal Bulletin, Vol. 55, No. 1, Year 1209 [pdf]

The Garbage Collection Handbook

Debian adds LoongArch as officially supported architecture

FCC Updates Covered List to Include Foreign UAS and UAS Critical Components [pdf]

Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves

What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth (no fluff)?

Solving the Problems of HBM-on-Logic

Scaling LLMs to Larger Codebases

Remove Black Color with Shaders

A centennial look back at Edward Gorey's macabre art and guarded life

Show HN: Python SDK – forecasting with foundation time-series and tabular models

Universal Reasoning Model (53.8% pass 1 ARC1 and 16.0% ARC 2)

FPGAs Need a New Future

The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300