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.

Gaussian Splatting – A$AP Rocky "Helicopter" music video

Provide agents with automated feedback

Flux 2 Klein pure C inference

The Code-Only Agent

A Social Filesystem

Dead Internet Theory

At least 21 killed in Spain after crash involving high-speed trains

Fil-Qt: A Qt Base build with Fil-C experience

Gas Town Decoded

AVX-512: First Impressions on Performance and Programmability

Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

Poking holes into bytecode with peephole optimisations

Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss

Using proxies to hide secrets from Claude Code

The space and motion of communicating agents (2008) [pdf]

Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)

Police Invested Millions in Shadowy Phone-Tracking Software Won't Say How Used

Astrophotography visibility plotting and planning tool

The Cathedral, the Megachurch, and the Bazaar

Sins of the Children

Show HN: Lume 0.2 – Build and Run macOS VMs with unattended setup

Ultrathink is deprecated & How to enable 2x thinking tokens in Claude Code

Simulating the Ladybug Clock Puzzle

Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

Wine 11.0

A free and open-source rootkit for Linux

Show HN: Beats, a web-based drum machine

ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

CD Projekt issue DMCA takedown notice against popular Cyberpunk VR mod

Stirling Cycle Machine Analysis