Fast(er) regular expression engines in Ruby

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

60•davidsojevic•9mo ago

Comments

yxhuvud•9mo ago

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

gitroom•9mo ago

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

kayodelycaon•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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•9mo 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.

I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard

Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw

Loops is a federated, open-source TikTok

Using New Bridges of FreeBSD 15

Algolia Hacker News Search GitHub Project Archived

Show HN: CIA World Factbook Archive (1990–2025), searchable and exportable

Attention Media ≠ Social Networks

Keybee: A Keyboard Designed for Smartphones

Six Math Essentials

Show HN: Local-First Linux MicroVMs for macOS

Fix your tools

Linuxulator on FreeBSD Feels Like Magic

Browse Code by Meaning

Hello Worg, the Org-Mode Community

What is a database transaction?

Fresh File Explorer – VS Code extension for navigating recent work

Emulated Windows 3.11 in the Browser

Xweather Live – Interactive global vector weather map

Music Discovery

The Tears of Donald Knuth

Git's Magic Files

Show HN: 3D Mahjong, Built in CSS

Show HN: Warn Firehose – Every US layoff notice in one searchable database

The Geometry of Tostitos Scoops

Zuckerberg's "Fix" for Child Safety Could End Anonymous Internet Access for All

Black-White Array: fast, ordered and based on with O(log N) memory allocations

Back to FreeBSD: Part 1

In World Without BlackBerry, Physical Keyboards on Phones Are Making a Comeback

Procedural Tron

Global Intelligence Crisis