Fast(er) regular expression engines in Ruby

https://serpapi.com/blog/faster-regular-expression-engines-in-ruby/

60•davidsojevic•11mo ago

Comments

yxhuvud•11mo ago

Eww, pretending to support utf8 matchers while not supporting them at all was not pretty to see.

gitroom•11mo ago

Honestly that part bugs me, fake support is worse than no support imo

kayodelycaon•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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.

Axios compromised on NPM – Malicious versions drop remote access trojan

Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview

Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry

Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)

Artemis II is not safe to fly

Combinators

Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram's obedience experiments

Anthropic: Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

Google's 200M-parameter time-series foundation model with 16k context

Universal Claude.md – cut Claude output tokens

Fedware: Government apps that spy harder than the apps they ban

Nobody Is Coming to Save Your Career

Do your own writing

Multiple Sclerosis

30 Years Ago, Robots Learned to Walk Without Falling

Good CTE, Bad CTE

7,655 Ransomware Claims in One Year: Group, Sector, and Country Breakdown

What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?

RamAIn (YC W26) Is Hiring

GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

Clojure: The Documentary, official trailer [video]

How to turn anything into a router

Android Developer Verification

Turning a MacBook into a touchscreen with $1 of hardware (2018)

We're Pausing Asimov Press

In Expanding de Sitter Space, Quantum Mechanics Gets More Elusive

One of the largest salt mines in the world exists under Lake Erie

OpenGridWorks: The Electricity Infrasctructure, Mapped

Bird brains (2023)

Oscar Reutersvärd (2021)