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.

The August 17 outage, and the work ahead

Consumer Rights Wiki

I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint

I should have loved biology (2020)

HTML Can Do That

Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload

Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI

CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s

Show HN: I trained a 125M model to autocomplete piano on-device

Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)

SpacetimeDB: A Short Technical Review

Linux 7.2

Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM

Detecting scraper bots through scroll behaviour

Tidal Cycles – Live coding music with Algorithmic patterns

How to compromise your system with a job interview

The Wonders of the Male Human Pelvis

Sixtyfour (YC P25) Is Hiring

Speeding Up (Small) Ruby Hashes

Code as an Artifact

Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful

Mojo is now open source

Watching TikTok and Instagram deactivates the cognitive control network: Study

Every Model Cheats

Hacking with Claude on a $27 smart watch

DiffusionGemma Technical Report

Git at any scale

In Which I Lose My Mind over Embeddings (HPLM Chapter 2)