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.

Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?

Whistle: Speech to Text in 16.9 MB

Show HN: Quake ported to safe Rust, playable in browser

Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs

Man discovers his parents' coffee machine used 1TB of data in 10 days

Theranos.world

I hired an illustrator to draw my house. Now it's my Home Assistant dashboard

Reducing undefined behavior in the C language

Yes, and

OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and Mathematics

The value of not getting to the point (2015)

AI-ready biological data: $1.8B global commitment

ETH-68: Ethernet Audio Interface for Linux

Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?

Beauty in DVD Menus

What should we tell our students?

Show HN: Making a flexible "neon" t-shirt with LED filaments

DuckDB Ducklake

A Terminal Protocol for Program Status (OSC 7501)

Step 5 Preview, a 1M-context MoE from StepFun, shows up on OpenRouter

Bevy 0.20

A 5.3M-year-old deep-sea whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone

Scaling and benchmarking a critical message bus using a new indexing strategy

ADHD as a circadian rhythm disorder: evidence and implications for chronotherapy (2025)

Show HN: Jevman – AI decision models play Pac-Man

OpenAI withdraws three mathematical results

Orkut.com

Archaeologists Are Reconstructing the 'Invisible' Technologies of the Stone Age

I think I found a planet nobody knew existed. I used Claude Code to find it

US man given prison sentence for bot-farming music streams