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.

Gemini 3.7 Flash

Accelerating GPT-5.6 Sol Ultrafast

Bluesky Protocol Services

NP-Overrated

Understanding is the new bottleneck

Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory

DeepSeek Harness developer preview

Mistral OCR 4.1

Spaghettifying DRAM

Choose Boring Technology (2015)

Finite State Machines in Forth (1994)

How AI text watermarking works

Where did the old web go? We followed 657,607 links to find out

How Gödel's Proof Works (2020)

Single log line is 49KB+ (ext4) / 110KB+ (btrfs) of systemd-journald disk writes

How Organizations Use AI: Evidence from ChatGPT [pdf]

How Compaction Works in Pi

How a device finds encrypted DNS by itself

Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data

Idol Mahjong Final Romance: A Slideshow Disguised as a Video Game

Smooth Move: Taming Trajectories with Polynomials

Kubernetes on Oxide: How customer needs shaped our integrations

AI At Home Part 1: A Box Of Scraps

Launch HN: Bullet (YC S26) – A Faster Coding Agent

Ordinary abundance

Tocharian Online

Text AI watermarks will always be trivial to remove

Choosing an AI model: one prompt, 11 models, different results

Gloomberb

ATG (YC F25) Is Hiring Member of Technical Staff (Data Platform)