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.

CSSQuake

I Stored a Website in a Favicon

Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You

16-year-old SATA II SSD survives 1 petabyte of writes, 25x the drive's rating

The Cold War's Accidental Whale Observatory

Bootimus – A Self-Contained PXE and HTTP Boot Server

Data Compression Explained (2012)

Can you see three trees?

There are no instances in ATProto

GPT-5.5 hallucinates 3x more than MIT-licensed GLM-5.2

The discovery that changed how scientists think about memory

Lithuanian startup launches open-source network to detect Shahed-type drones

LLMs Are Complicated Now

Surprising economics of load-balanced systems

A 1969 camera operators' strike created Upstairs Downstairs multiverse

Human Judgment as a Specification

Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

How many of the 170k English words do you know?

Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28

Bobby Prince, composer for Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, and Duke Nukem 3D, has died

Soccer Arcade Games Through the Years

A Perceptron in Age of Empires II

Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

AURpocalypse now: a look at the recent AUR attacks

Egyptian Fractions (2006)

Zen and the Art of Machine Learning Research

Building a robotics research setup that lives next to my desk

Court Records Should Be Free

Telescope Ranchers