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.

Person of Interest

Petered (what happens after the Peter Principle)

Llama-modchip: 284B DeepSeek on 64GB RAM, no GPU

JIT bitmap text rendering for microcontrollers

Goodbye Claude, Hello Pi

What I run on my $10 USD OpenStick homelab

Clj.rs – a Clojure dialect implemented in Rust

Claude Code's "Don't Ask Again" exposes passwords in 1,122 public GitHub files

Agent memory needs its OpenTelemetry moment

Porting Android 16 to my blind mother's keypad phone

Finding Xanadu: Inside a JRPG classic translation 15 years in the making

New typeface using intricate designs from Shakespeare's First Folio (2023)

Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser

Earliest evidence of cannabis use found in ancient Siberian tomb

Making any integer with four 2s (2025)

WaveDudeNext 2D Wave Simulator

Consumer brain wave headsets threaten privacy

Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member classifier

Uranium cubes reveal why the German nuclear project failed

MaxxBench – "Nice DeepSWE score. But is it true?"

Every Windows 11 app should kill Electron, and Discord just showed why

Kirlian Photography: Building Your Own Equipment

GitHub New pull request overview page in public preview

ISponsorBlockTV: SponsorBlock client for all YouTube TV clients

Show HN: Coldframe, a honeypot that poses as a supermarket fridge controller

Mizu – zero-copy parallel R and Python over shared memory

Amsterdam School

I will not be using LLMs in my coding

The end of Microsoft Research's AI Frontiers group

The $8 Linux Computer (2022)