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.

Hilariously Fast Volume Computation with the Divergence Theorem

Saving 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1's DNS cache

Small Models Have Arrived

Sovereign Tech Agency invests €500k in Flatpak

507 Mechanical Movements

Show HN: OpenTIE and OpenXWA, Modern Ports of Tie Fighter and X-Wing Alliance

Gemini-3.5-Transcribe

Microduck

Doctors are finally learning to manage antidepressant withdrawal

We found a division by zero bug in FFmpeg with a vibecoded fuzzer

Climate change is strengthening El Niño, coral records suggest

Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash

Terminal-Bench-Science: Evaluating AI agents on scientific research workflows

Show HN: We built open OpenRouter that turns usage into a better model

Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

The turbulent AI era is here

Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B

GoGoGrandparent (YC S16) is hiring back end engineers

Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days

Afterglow: Run classic After Dark screen savers on modern macOS

Select * from Internet.blogposts

Emacs 31: An unofficial guide to Markdown-ts-mode

M5Stack Launches PaperMono

Previewing the Model Hardware Standard

Bootstrappable Builds: How and Why

Suica, Japan's First IC Transit Card

Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal

Show HN: Voronoi Go

Engineered yeast for converting plastic and biomass compounds to food additives

Show HN: FnScribe – Open-source, offline dictation for macOS