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.

Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds

AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible

If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it

GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher

Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP

San Francisco Onion Futures Company

“The Secret Life of Circuits” is here

Apple M6 Pro Achieves the Highest Single-Core CPU Score in Geekbench 7

Dear Customer, Fuck You

Cloudflare Quick Tunnels

SDCC – Small Device C Compiler

How to Write with an LLM

Science Is Open Software

Saving another 100TB of RAM

Why building a Rust LSP is hard

You can run Git on object storage if you re-make packfiles

How OpenAI Used Its Own LLMs to Design Its Jalapeño Chip

Ctenophores: Wonders of Biology

NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation open-Source Geospatial AI Model

The first new cat species discovered in 100 years

OpenJev

Goroutine Leak Profiles

Show HN: Cactus Needle 3: 8-29MB automation models can match DeepSeek V4 Flash

Photon-Emission-Guided Laser Fault Injection Enables RP2350 Secure Debug

Communication by means of modulated Johnson noise

Veronese's Dogs

Cache-to-Cache: Direct Semantic Communication Between LLMs (2025)

Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy (2021)

Inside ZCode: Silently uploading your Git history to the cloud

Cyclomatic Complexity in C#