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.

Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU

Samsung's Processing-in-Memory (PIM)

GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

Boot a Virtual iPhone via Apple's Virtualization.framework

Glacier Mice

Creating the Aetheryte Radio

Htmx 4.0

Hunting Down a Go Runtime Bug on 32-Bit Embedded Systems

Europe's last regular standard-gauge steam passenger service

Show HN: Galaxium, an experimental WebGPU space explorer

U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective

StemDeck, a free, open-source and local AI stem separator

EVE Online moves to Python 3

I accidentally turned LLM memory into program analysis

Inception-style curved map for turn-by-turn directions

TurboKV: Insanely fast Rust key-value store

Just the rumour of a bug is enough to find an exploit these days

Show HN: Typebase – A single-folder back end you write in TypeScript

Time complexity of operations on Python's built-in types

Queen Caroline turned King Arthur into an 18C royal PR strategy

Monzo Stand-In

Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

Does the Sumerian King List Align with Paleoclimate Events?

Experiments with Plotter Art

The Twelve-Factor App (2025)

Curvature Beziers: Improving on a timeless recipe

Box of 300 Love Letters Showed Up, What Whimsical WWII Soldier Who Wrote Them?

Visual Analysis of Binary Files

EasyEffects can improve laptop speaker sound quality

GLM-5.3 is now open-weight