Fast(er) regular expression engines in Ruby

https://serpapi.com/blog/faster-regular-expression-engines-in-ruby/

60•davidsojevic•11mo ago

Comments

yxhuvud•11mo ago

Eww, pretending to support utf8 matchers while not supporting them at all was not pretty to see.

gitroom•11mo ago

Honestly that part bugs me, fake support is worse than no support imo

kayodelycaon•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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.

Google releases Gemma 4 open models

Tailscale's new macOS home

Cursor 3

George Goble died recently – known for first dual-CPU-Unix and fast BBQ lighting

Qwen3.6-Plus: Towards real world agents

Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

Significant progress made on Xbox 360 recompilation

Lemonade by AMD: a fast and open source local LLM server using GPU and NPU

LinkedIn is illegally searching your computer

Zep AI Is Hiring – Building the Agent Context Layer (YC W24)

JSON Canvas Spec

OpenAI Acquires TBPN

Artemis computer running two instances of MS outlook; they can't figure out why

Inside Nepal's Fake Rescue Racket

Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer

Significant Raise of Reports

Magic the Gathering Deck Shuffler

IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm

Yggdrasil Network

Show HN: A P2P messenger with dual network modes (Fast and Tor)

Artemis II will use laser beams to live-stream 4K moon footage at 260 Mbps

Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom

Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year

Delve allegedly forked an open-source tool and sold it as its own

Hugo's New CSS Powers

Amazon to add 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge as Iran war raises energy prices

The case for zero-error horizons in trustworthy LLMs

'Backrooms' and the Rise of the Institutional Gothic

Quadratic Micropass Type Inference

Modern SQLite: Features You Didn't Know It Had