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.

Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to overthinking things

The Life and Death of Direct File [pdf]

A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”

AGI-64 Brings Sierra Adventures to the Commodore 64

Reticulum – Decentralized Mesh Network

Claude: System Prompts

Rhombus 1.1 is now available

Linear Algebra Done Right – Sheldon Axler

Low-Tech Ceramic Water Filter

Design 3D-printable parts by talking

Applying a photosynthetic process to treat “dry eye”

Interview with Amit Patel, Creator of “Solar Realms Elite” (2013)

SIMD in the 90s: Programming Intel's Pentium MMX

How do I permanently disable random Google Photos popup to backup photos? (2024)

Strong gravitational lensing and microlensing of supernovae (2024)

$12B of US ratepayers' money wasted on a modeling mistake in PJM

Dancing with friends and enemies: boids' swarm intelligence (2012)

Show HN: Vocal Slice – Cut audio by selecting text, fully on-device

Prolly: A content-addressed ordered map built on prolly trees

The AI Credit Resale Economy

MathCode, Mathematical Coding Agent

Protobuf has LSP support. You're welcome

Stripe will reportedly acquire OpenRouter for $7B+

Red queen hypothesis – A new way forward for self-improving AI

Plastic mechanical computer from 1963: The Digi-Comp 1 [video]

Clamiga: Common Lisp for the Amiga

Nvidia dramatically reduces amount of OpenAI infra financing it may guarantee

Anton Chekhov played at love most of his life

Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker

Tell HN: Cloudflare silently injects its analytics when you switch nameservers