Fast(er) regular expression engines in Ruby

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

60•davidsojevic•8mo ago

Comments

yxhuvud•8mo ago

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

gitroom•8mo ago

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

kayodelycaon•8mo 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•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.

Cloudflare acquires Astro

6-Day and IP Address Certificates Are Generally Available

Michelangelo's first painting, created when he was 12 or 13

Just the Browser

Launch HN: Indy (YC S21) – A support app designed for ADHD brains

Lock-Picking Robot

Zep AI (Agent Context Engineering, YC W24) Is Hiring Forward Deployed Engineers

Read_once(), Write_once(), but Not for Rust

Can You Disable Spotlight and Siri in macOS Tahoe?

psc: The ps utility, with an eBPF twist and container context

Training my smartwatch to track intelligence

OpenBSD-current now runs as guest under Apple Hypervisor

List of individual trees

Interactive eBPF

Why DuckDB is my first choice for data processing

Pocket TTS: A high quality TTS that gives your CPU a voice

Exasol Personal – Democratizing Big Data Analytics

The spectrum of isolation: From bare metal to WebAssembly

Show HN: mdto.page – Turn Markdown into a shareable webpage instantly

Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark

Canada slashes 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6%

Show HN: I built a text-based business simulator to replace video courses

Boeing knew of flaw in part linked to UPS plane crash, NTSB report says

Inside The Internet Archive's Infrastructure

Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?

Show HN: pgwire-replication - pure rust client for Postgres CDC

Cursor's latest "browser experiment" implied success without evidence

Linux boxes via SSH: suspended when disconected

Altaid 8800 (2024)

Show HN: Hc: an agentless, multi-tenant shell history sink