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.

Transcribe.cpp

Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb

Better and Cheaper Than IPTV

Classic Amiga titles, free to download

Mathematicians still don't know the fastest way to multiply numbers

If You Build It, They Will Come

GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization

Mayor Mamdani Says Landlords Can't Use AI Images to Advertise

I'm Making Strandfall, a Solarpunk Orienteering Larp

Harness Engineering

Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?

Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol on an NP-Hard Problem: Does /goal help?

Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day

Gleam Is Now on Tangled

AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

Elixir-lang.org has a new design

Developing an Intuitive Sense of Scale

Co-evolution of self-replication and function in a digital primordial soup

LG monitors silently install software through Windows Update without consent

Real-Time LuaTeX: Recompiling Large Documents in 1ms [pdf]

Setting up your spare Mac for Claude Code to control, a step-by-step guide

Our Approach to Bioresilience: Isomorphic Labs and Google DeepMind

Show HN: Q3Edit – Edit and play Quake 3 maps in the browser

A Second-Grade Teacher Revived a Beloved Video Game

European Court Confirms Ethical Veganism Is a Protected Philosophical Belief

Judge a book by its first pages

Codex Resets

What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

Tech note: making your own V-I plots at home

How GitHub gave every repository a durable owner