fp.

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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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 creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

Microsoft probably killed my Snapdragon Dev Kit

Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone

On the slow death of scaling

Electronic nose for indoor mold detection and identification

Sergey Brin's Unretirement

Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far

A 30B Qwen model walks into a Raspberry Pi and runs in real time

Show HN: SMTP Tunnel – A SOCKS5 proxy disguised as email traffic to bypass DPI

Oral microbiome sequencing after taking probiotics

We recreated Steve Jobs's 1975 Atari horoscope program

Show HN: VaultSandbox – Test your real MailGun/SES/etc. integration

Vietnam bans unskippable ads

What *is* code? (2015)

CES 2026: Taking the Lids Off AMD's Venice and MI400 SoCs

Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024)

Comparing AI agents to cybersecurity professionals in real-world pen testing

I wanted a camera that doesn't exist, so I built it

Launch HN: Tamarind Bio (YC W24) – AI Inference Provider for Drug Discovery

Two ways to crack a walnut, per Grothendieck (2025)

Show HN: Make audio loops online

High-Performance DBMSs with io_uring: When and How to use it

Laylo (YC S20) – Head of Growth (Organic and Partners and Loops and AI) – Remote US

The 5 Knights of the MCP Apocalypse

Locating a Photo of a Vehicle in 30 Seconds with GeoSpy

PassSeeds – hijacking Passkeys to unlock new cryptographic use cases

Passing of Joe Mancuso

Why the trans flag emoji is the 5-codepoint sequence it is

One Hundred Years of Gossip

The Manifold Mind of Saul Bellow

Fast(er) regular expression engines in Ruby

Comments