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.

Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

Show HN: Isopolis – Isometric pixel map of SF

CP/M-386 – CP/M for 386 protected mode, derived from CP/M‑68K

Karpathy’s Pelican

Show HN: ssh ssh.place

Show HN: A Handwritten Blogging Platform

Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap

Autoregressive Language Model on the 6502 Processor

Show HN: Kakehashi – Experimental userspace to run macOS binaries on Linux ARM

Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

Developers are attached to tools because tools encode trust

SwiftUI After 7 Years

RFC 9851: TLS 1.2 is in Feature Freeze

Read the novels and forget everything else

The myth of Snow Leopard

The Computational Theory of Mind (2015)

Show HN: Mu – Tools for Agents

How the words we teach English language learners changed

F*: A general-purpose proof-oriented programming language

Show HN: Make your Framework 12 sound like a creaky door

My personal AI benchmark: “Generate an SVG of a frog with a Habsburg jaw”

Show HN: NixOS-DGX-Spark – Nix and NixOS on the DGX Spark

When transit passes were designed by hand (2022)

TinyNES Review – A Super Niche NES Console

Californians' data deletion requests, DROP, become enforceable Aug. 1

Folding Paper Globes

Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours

Why we write our own C and C++ inference engines

Rooting, firmware analysis and persistent credentials of TP-Link TL-841N

Fasttracker II clone in C using SDL 2