Fast(er) regular expression engines in Ruby

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

60•davidsojevic•7mo ago

Comments

yxhuvud•7mo ago

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

gitroom•7mo ago

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

kayodelycaon•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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 Flash: frontier intelligence built for speed

Coursera to combine with Udemy

AI will make formal verification go mainstream

alpr.watch

No Graphics API

Announcing the Beta release of ty

Notes on Sorted Data

Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

TLA+ Modeling Tips

Learning the oldest programming language (2024)

Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

GPT Image 1.5

I ported JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with Codex CLI and GPT-5.2 in hours

40 percent of fMRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity

Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo

Thin desires are eating life

AI's real superpower: consuming, not creating

Modern SID chip substitutes [video]

Annual Production of 1/72 (22mm) scale plastic soldiers, 1958-2025

Playing Santa changed Bob Rutan profoundly

Japan to revise romanization rules for first time in 70 years

Introduction to Software Development Tooling (2024)

Sega Channel: VGHF Recovers over 100 Sega Channel ROMs (and More)

Subsets (YC S23) is hiring engineers in Copenhagen, Denmark

Show HN: I built a WebMIDI sequencer to control my hardware synths

The World Happiness Report is beset with methodological problems

Nvidia Nemotron 3 Family of Models

Living Particle System

P: Formal Modeling and Analysis of Distributed (Event-Driven) Systems