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.

Figmimic – A bookmarklet to copy any webpage into Figma as editable layers

NanoGPT Speedrun Frontier

Why your local LLM feels dumber than it is

Scrap (2006)

ElevenLabs, TwelveLabs, ThirteenLabs

Hister – A private, full content search index that you control

typ.ing

I set a trap for a book-marketing scammer (2025)

RF Cafe

How a Texas student blew the whistle on a rogue AI hacking attempt

A Friendly Introduction to Racket

NetBSD and my life (2005)

ATProto spaces: A new extension to ATProto that enables non-public data

Thinking in Python

Munder Difflin – Agent harness to run an office of your clones

Reading Maps – Journeys from fiction drawn on the real world

hdiutil is deprecated in macOS 27 Golden Gate

One night in Uzbekistan: Why was this one data point so influential?

A week of using Codex more than Claude

Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down

Autolith: A programming agent with a live runtime

Conway's Game of Life in real life

ProgramBench Vetted: Reverse Engineering from a Runnable Binary

Protocol-Aware Deterministic Simulation Testing

What's in a PowerPoint File?

Show HN: OzBrain, a shared brain for knowledge between agents and your team

Why it might be time to rethink the human family tree

Z80 – The 1970s Microprocessor Still Alive (2021)

Show HN: terminal-code – VS Code inside the terminal

Rust Glancer: Rust LSP using 100x less RAM