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.

Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale

Show HN: TitleArt – Make text like it's 1997

PaperPilot – Zero-Cloud, Pure-Rust PDF Engine with WASM and MCP

Birdwatching rewires the brain and slows cognitive decline

Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office

Dolly Parton's Imagination Library

Growing Trees

Show HN: A Truly Modular Keyboard

Overgrown, when plants invade your abandoned tabs

Superhuman Hardware Design Is the Easy Part

Attention Is Not What You Need (2025)

Iron Age salt-mining complex found beneath Hallstatt in Austria

IBM CEO says open weight models are now good and cheap on-prem

Why I Am a Programmer

Steal My Bitcoin CTF PoC

Microsoft Decision-1: 9B Qwen Model Launch Explained

F-Zero X on Nintendo 3DS

The State of Context Engineering

We should be more ambitious with the software we build

Two Million Hornets

Amazon’s “digital pacifier” for toddlers

Show HN: ADRs for AI – Deliberation records for human–AI work, versioned in Git

A 10-year-old CNN outperforms frontier LLMs for skin cancer diagnosis

OpenAI and Anthropic cut their LLM prices by up to 80% within a few months. Why?

Removing Next.js Got My Blog to 100 on Every Lighthouse Category

Making the Buddha Head from Merv Whole Again

Where the Romans Fought (interactive map)

Active incident at Dreamhost forcing password reset

What goes into making an animated film?

I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Join Me at FOSDEM 27