Fast(er) regular expression engines in Ruby

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

60•davidsojevic•12mo ago

Comments

yxhuvud•12mo ago

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

gitroom•12mo ago

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

kayodelycaon•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo 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.

Zed 1.0

Copy Fail – CVE-2026-31431

Cursor Camp

OpenTrafficMap

HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing

FastCGI: 30 years old and still the better protocol for reverse proxies

Vera: a programming language designed for machines to write

Why I still reach for Lisp and Scheme instead of Haskell

I benchmarked Claude Code's caveman plugin against "be brief."

Claude.ai and API Unavailable

DRAM Crunch: Lessons for System Design

Laws of UX

An open-source stethoscope that costs between $2.5 and $5 to produce

Gooseworks (YC W23) Is Hiring a Founding Growth Engineer

Ramp's Sheets AI Exfiltrates Financials

Consequences of passing too few register parameters to a C function

Be Alexandra Elbakyan

We need a federation of forges

The Lingua Franca of LaTeX (2019)

Kyoto cherry blossoms now bloom earlier than at any point in 1,200 years

Online age verification is the hill to die on

How to Build the Future: Demis Hassabis [video]

Postgres's lateral joins allow for quite the good eDSL

Ghostty is leaving GitHub

What can we gain by losing infinity?

Claude.ai Down Again?

Virtualisation on Apple Silicon Macs is different

GitHub – DOS 1.0: Transcription of Tim Paterson's DOS Printouts

Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores

At Protocol: Building the Social Internet