Fast(er) regular expression engines in Ruby

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

60•davidsojevic•9mo ago

Comments

yxhuvud•9mo ago

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

gitroom•9mo ago

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

kayodelycaon•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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.

Toyota Fluorite: "console-grade" Flutter game engine

Claude Code Is Being Dumbed Down

NetNewsWire Turns 23

GLM-5: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering

GLM-OCR: Accurate × Fast × Comprehensive

WiFi Could Become an Invisible Mass Surveillance System

We rendered and embedded one million CAD files

It's not finance, it's your pensions

A shortage of tenors

Single bone in Spain offers first direct evidence of Hannibal's war elephants

It's all a blur

FAA halts all flights at El Paso airport for 10 days

Show HN: AI agents play SimCity through a REST API

Should your developer company go open source?

Why Vampires Live Forever

Rome is studded with cannon balls (2022)

Exposure Simulator

The Day the Telnet Died

AI-First Company Memos

Show HN: Renovate – The Kubernetes-Native Way

Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place

Communities are not fungible

Railway (PaaS) global outage

The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)

Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

Ask HN: Why are electronics still so unrecyclable?

CoLoop (YC S21) Is Hiring Ex Technical Founders in London

Chrome extensions spying on users' browsing data

How Did the FBI Get Nancy Guthrie's Nest Doorbell Footage?

A Cosmic Miracle: A Remarkably Luminous Galaxy at z=14.44 Confirmed with JWST