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.

GPU World

Fastpotify

Tmp.0ut Volume 5

Restroom Archive

I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system

Playa Phone

A walkable ASCII cyberpunk city in one HTML file [video]

CollectWise (YC F24) Is Hiring

Terence Tao explains 6 essential mathematical concepts [video]

Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates

Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination

RotaryCell: Making an unmodified rotary phone work over LTE with an ESP32-S3

Borges Labyrinth in Venice reopens to the public

Flat vs. segmented memory – it's recursive

Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio

Show HN: Laser Graffiti

Roget's Thesaurus

Vermell – Minimal, dependency-free C++ web framework using epoll

I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked

Cheap GPS jammers are filling the world with navigation dead zones

Interactive pattern discovery in binaries (FF-16-TUI)

2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up

Smartphone LED detects hidden cameras with AI

Lion-man

DoltLite: A SQLite fork with Git-style version control, built with 2k agent PRs

Reverse engineering my ADHD test

RavynOS: Pre-alpha open-source OS based on Darwin, FreeBSD, Apple open-source

AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too

ChatGPT Work Tool and Skill Reference

Run macOS Software on Linux