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.

Internet Archive Switzerland

Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users

How LEDs are made (2014)

Using Claude Code: The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML

A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro

LLMs Corrupt Your Documents When You Delegate

Mythical Man Month

OpenAI’s WebRTC problem

America's carpet capital: an empire and its toxic legacy

Killswitch: Per-function short-circuit mitigation primitive

Making Julia as Fast as C++ (2019)

David Attenborough's 100th Birthday

Reviving the IBM Selectric Composer Fonts (2023)

What causes lightning? The answer keeps getting more interesting

Wi is Fi: Understanding Wi-Fi 4/5/6/6E/7/8 (802.11 n/AC/ax/be/bn)

Removing fsync from our local storage engine

Read Programming as Theory Building

AI is breaking two vulnerability cultures

Cartoon Network Flash Games

AWS North Virginia data center outage – resolved

An Introduction to Meshtastic

The React2Shell Story

Teaching Claude Why

You gave me a u32. I gave you root. (io_uring ZCRX freelist LPE)

Forking the Web

Can LLMs model real-world systems in TLA+?

Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM

Light without electricity? Glowing algae could make it possible

US Government releases first batch of UAP documents and videos

Roadside Attraction