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.

Half-Life 2 in a Browser

Wikipedia Workers in Britain set global first by seeking union recognition

Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

Cloudflare launched self-managed OAuth for all

LuaJIT 3.0 proposed syntax extensions

Bohemia Interactive: Cold War Assault Remastered Source Code on GitHub

Blogging can just be stating the obvious

Markdy: Like Mermaid Diagrams, but for Motion

Medical students are using popular research tool to pump out misleading studies

Dostoyevsky isn't difficult

45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero

Zombie unicorns are haunting Silicon Valley

GLM-5.2 is a step change for open agents

Qualcomm to Acquire Modular

Show HN: Nimic – Pure Python as a systems language with AOT compilation

The Unbearable Cheapness of Open Weight Models

RubyLLM: A Ruby framework for all major AI providers

Aisle Discovers 6 New CVEs in Curl, Including the Oldest Issue Ever Reported

PR spam today looks like email spam in the early 2000s

Mixing Visual and Textual Code

Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

The Xteink X4 E-Ink Reader

Shall We Play a Coordination Game?

Show HN: Write SaaS apps where users control where their data is stored

Show HN: Brain Frog – Can you be random enough for 11 lines of JavaScript?

Matt's Script Archive: The Scripts That Reshaped the Web

Show HN: Nub – A Bun-like all-in-one toolkit for Node.js

A Practical Guide to SSH Tunnels: Local and Remote Port Forwarding

15 sorting algorithms in 6 minutes (2013) [video]