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.

Critical CVE issued for hallucinated SQLite vulnerability

Devtools must be open source

Taylor Farms Has Rewritten Its Cyclospora Statement Four Times in Sixteen Days

MiniMax H3 Day-0 Support in ComfyUI: Open Weights, Native Audio, and 2K Video

Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

Launch HN: Hoplite (YC S26) – Effortlessly deploy cloud coding agents

Andy Pavlo Joins ClickHouse to Establish ClickHouse Labs

What's the largest software project AI can complete on its own?

How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

Don't be a meat proxy

Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

AirLLM 70B inference with single 4GB GPU

Show HN: Product analytics (and evals) for agent sessions on your MCP

Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library

C++ float-to-int conversion can be undefined behavior

SPF Record Syntax: Mechanisms, Qualifiers, Modifiers, and Macros

Explanation of INT8 ConvRot (FP8 is no longer needed)

Rust project goals: Immobile types and guaranteed destructors

Show HN: Nightcrawler – A local AI pentesting agent running on a smartphone

What DMARC Protects You From, and What It Does Not

The Abandoned Fish Sauce Terrorizing a Small Canadian Town

Games at the press of a button: The Rip-O-Bot (1989)

Kraid is a now a real compiler

Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code

Walk on Decomposed Subdomains

Train Simulator Controller

Finding zombies in our systems: A real-world story of CPU bottlenecks

Octane – React’s programming model, compiled

Show HN: Isopolis – Isometric pixel map of SF