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.

Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot

Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample

Cruller: Bun's Zig Runtime, Continued on Zig 0.16

Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

GigaToken: ~1000x faster Language model tokenization

ANSI escape injection in MCP servers: Hidden from humans, visible to AI

Show HN: Bento - An entire PowerPoint in one HTML file (edit+view+data+collab)

Everyone should know SIMD

git's –end-of-options Flag

EU fines Google €890M for competition breaches over search and apps

Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing?

So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe

Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

Making

Show HN: Cactus Hybrid: We taught Gemma 4 to know when it's wrong

The startup's Postgres survival guide

Making ASCII Art in Vim

The Unity CLI: manage Unity from your terminal

Medici family mystery may be solved after more than 400 years

John C. Dvorak has died

Why malloc always does more than I asked for?

Malleable Computing, Emacs, and You

Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

Fairphone 6 wide camera experimental Linux support

Computing Camera Rays

Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth

ascdraw: Editor for ASCII/UTF-8 diagrams (in 144FPS)

Back to Kagi

Restructuring GitHub's bug bounty program