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.

Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen

Show HN: Hacker Times, a New York Times-inspired version of Hacker News

DiscImageStudio: burn visible artwork onto CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs

Nvidia – open-source auto-ontology

European RISC-V Industrial Computing Initiative

Show HN: Subvocal – Talk to your computer without making noise

Resisting Cognitive Surrender

Toit v2.0.0

Efficient algorithms, the Exponential Time Hypothesis, and losing the plot

US boy names that became girl names and vice versa

If you love a website, back it up

Scaling Git at OpenAI

uBlock Origin filter to block autoplay videos in TechCrunch

Show HN: ReBirth 338 in Browser

Self-Employed? Solopreneur? NIST Has a Cybersecurity Guide Just for You

Launch HN: Momentic (YC W24) – Agents that catch bugs by using your app

Show HN: Warsaw in voxels – An interactive 3D map of the city centre

Open-Source 5G Ran Platforms: A Dual Perspective on Performance and Capabilities

Shrinking NixOS RAM footprint and resource requirements to the bare minimum

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2026)

Optical Circuit Switch Technology Built on Low-Loss Silicon Photonics Platform

Egoless Mathematics in the AI Era

SLAC researchers find proof of altermagnetism, a new magnetic phase

Show HN: I built a little browser game to practice Vim commands

Cloudflare experiencing multiple active incidents

The SEC Should Block Anthropic's IPO to Protect the Public

Polyend releases the Tracker firmware source code

Ubuntu still has not released patch for Linux 0day RCE in almost 3 weeks

WTF Ubuntu?

V100 SXM2 pinout and NVLink reference