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.

Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

Monosketch

Open Source Is Not About You (2018)

Green’s Dictionary of Slang - Five hundred years of the vulgar tongue

Faster Than Dijkstra?

Resizing windows on macOS Tahoe – the saga continues

MinIO repository is no longer maintained

Apple, fix my keyboard before the timer ends or I'm leaving iPhone

An open replacement for the IBM 3174 Establishment Controller

Implementing Auto Tiling with Just 5 Tiles

GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark

Gemini 3 Deep Think

Gauntlet AI (YC S17) train you to master building with AI, give you $200k+ job

MMAcevedo aka Lena by qntm

Cache Monet

Tell HN: Ralph Giles has died (Xiph.org| Rust@Mozilla | Ghostscript)

Advanced Aerial Robotics Made Simple

An AI agent published a hit piece on me

Particle Lenia

We interfaced single-threaded C++ with multi-threaded Rust

CSS-Doodle

AWS Adds support for nested virtualization

Polis: Open-source platform for large-scale civic deliberation

Improving 15 LLMs at Coding in One Afternoon. Only the Harness Changed

Apocalypse no: how almost everything we thought we knew about the Maya is wrong

What Drives Stock Market Returns?

Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

Ruby Newbie Is Joining the Ruby Users Forum

Japan's Dododo Land, the most irritating place on Earth