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.

NPMX – a fast, modern browser for the NPM registry

Show HN: Data Engineering Book – An open source, community-driven guide

GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

Common Lisp Screenshots: today's CL applications in action

Building a TUI is easy now

Adventures in Neural Rendering

Font Rendering from First Principles

Gradient.horse

The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

gRPC: From service definition to wire format

What dating apps are optimizing. Hint: It isn't love

OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission

Monosketch

The Blurred Line Between Video Calling and Live Streaming Software

I'm not worried about AI job loss

Stanford Review: Is YC for Cowards?

Show HN: I spent 3 years reverse-engineering a 40 yo stock market sim from 1986

How did the Maya survive?

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – More Things Have Happened

Show HN: Skill that lets Claude Code/Codex spin up VMs and GPUs

Advanced Aerial Robotics Made Simple

WolfSSL sucks too, so now what?

CSS-Doodle

The wonder of modern drywall

Faster Than Dijkstra?

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

Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

Implementing Auto Tiling with Just 5 Tiles

Show HN: Moltis – AI assistant with memory, tools, and self-extending skills

Sandwich Bill of Materials