Fast(er) regular expression engines in Ruby

https://serpapi.com/blog/faster-regular-expression-engines-in-ruby/

60•davidsojevic•8mo ago

Comments

yxhuvud•8mo ago

Eww, pretending to support utf8 matchers while not supporting them at all was not pretty to see.

gitroom•8mo ago

Honestly that part bugs me, fake support is worse than no support imo

kayodelycaon•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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.

Show HN: Sweep, Open-weights 1.5B model for next-edit autocomplete

Doctors in Brazil using tilapia fish skin to treat burn victims

From stealth blackout to whitelisting: Inside the Iranian shutdown

Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code

Show HN: ChartGPU – WebGPU-powered charting library (1M points at 60fps)

Claude's new constitution

Binary fuse filters: Fast and smaller than xor filters (2022)

Show HN: TerabyteDeals – Compare storage prices by $/TB

Skip is now free and open source

Show HN: High speed graphics rendering research with tinygrad/tinyJIT

Hands-On Introduction to Unikernels

Lix – universal version control system for binary files

Show HN: Rails UI

Letting Claude play text adventures

TrustTunnel: AdGuard VPN protocol goes open-source

Show HN: RatatuiRuby wraps Rust Ratatui as a RubyGem – TUIs with the joy of Ruby

Tell HN: 2 years building a kids audio app as a solo dev – lessons learned

Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi

Show HN: Open-source certificate from GitHub activity

Beowulf's opening "What" is no interjection (2013)

The WebRacket language is a subset of Racket that compiles to WebAssembly

Convert potentially dangerous PDFs to safe PDFs

Golfing APL/K in 90 Lines of Python

Jerry (YC S17) Is Hiring

SIMD programming in pure Rust

Can you slim macOS down?

Show HN: Differentiable Quantum Chemistry

Nested code fences in Markdown

Challenges in join optimization

Show HN: Dotenv Mask Editor: No more embarrassing screen leaks of your .env