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.

Pandoc Templates

Zig: Build System Reworked

The Kaiser and a "Mediocre Man" Theory of History

SQLite is all you need for durable workflows

Danish pension fund excludes SpaceX citing governance and valuation

Proposed new US funding rules: We can cancel any grant at any time

Floor and Ceil versus Denormals on CPU and GPU

Show HN: Helios – what plug-in solar could generate for any address in Britain

Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled

What Happened to the Locusts?

Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit

What It Takes to Preserve Floppy Disks

Print with dozens of colors: Our new open-source ColorMix for PrusaSlicer

MCP is dead?

Algebraic Effects for the Rest of Us

It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots

The dead economy theory

The Last Technical Interview

Perry Compiles TypeScript directly to executables using SWC and LLVM

A new register allocator for ZJIT

Understand Anything – Graphs that teach the codebase

Naphtha shortages in Japan

OpenRCT2 v0.5.1 "Swamp Castle" released Last version to support Windows 7

Is AI causing a repeat of frontend’s lost decade?

Show HN: Open-source private home security camera system (end-to-end encryption)

Liquid AI reveals 8B-A1B MoE trained on 38T

Bijou64: A variable-length integer encoding

Quantum dot qubit using High NA EUV lithography

Show HN: Tiny-vLLM – high performance LLM inference engine in C++ and CUDA