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 time the x86 emulator team found code so bad they fixed it during emulation

I Could've Rickrolled the FIFA World Cup. All I Needed Was My ID

John Carmack on Fabrice Bellard

A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer

Banned Book Library in a Wi-Fi Smart Light Bulb

Iroh 1.0

Show HN: Garden of Flowers – an archive of pictorial typography before ASCII art

Ask HN: Has anyone replaced Claude/GPT with a local model for daily coding?

TinyWind: A pixel pirate sailing game with real wind physics (380k+ kms sailed)

I hacked into the worst e-bike and fixed it [video]

I Love the Computer

Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

Why I email complete strangers

Cohere's First Model for Developers

Amazon Announces Multibillion-Dollar Data Center in Missouri

The 90-year-old idea behind JEPA models: Canonical Correlation Analysis

My Homelab AI Dev Platform

Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible

Hetzner Price Adjustment

Chili peppers of the world: cultivars, species, and heat

Fox to buy Roku

What job interviews taught me about Kubernetes

What every coder should know about gamma (2016)

Copper transport drug restores memory and clears toxic Alzheimer's proteins

Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B

Game Engine White Papers: Commander Keen

Launch HN: Drafted (YC P26) – Models for residential architecture

How TimescaleDB compresses time-series data

Show HN: Veterinarian turned founder, AI lawn diagnosis

Claude Corps