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.

Fold Epic Paper Airplanes

Humans will never again create a project like Wikipedia

Zebkit – Chromium as an embeddable library

What is malloc doing, anyway?

I Saw Your HN Comment

Fun things to do with your VM/370 CE machine – Fun with big computers

KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rust and WebGPU

Next-Concept Modeling: Fast, Parallel Coarse-to-Fine Text Generation

Active Benchmarking

Unlocking any car from X brand in most of the world

Burying the Evidence: nine out of every 10 time capsules go missing

He Was a Suspect in the Yogurt Shop Murders for Thirty Years. He Can't Forget

I'm not convinced the AI bubble exists

How Australia played the first music on a computer

Declarative Dragging

Borrowing a Microsoft-signed shim to abuse Secure Boot on corporate hardware

Outlook.com is rejecting email from domains without DMARC

Chimera Vocal Synth

Psalm 7 release: PHP security&static analysis software

Crypto foundation demanded employees endorse suicide pledge

ChatGPT Desktop forwards your SSH agent to remote machines

Show HN: Flide: Make Jev-like decision models up to 9.5x faster

Quasi-Logarithmic Kitchen Timer

Dux: Free, open-source Wayland desktop shell with file manager and theming

Ask HN: What are you working on? (November 2026)

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's letter to staff about affair

The French Cake Cooked on a Spit (2018) [video]

Ur-Nammu Founder of the Sumerian Renaissance

Writing as a thinking tool

Llama-modchip: 284B DeepSeek on 64GB RAM, no GPU