Fast(er) regular expression engines in Ruby

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

60•davidsojevic•7mo ago

Comments

yxhuvud•7mo ago

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

gitroom•7mo ago

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

kayodelycaon•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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.

GPT-5.2

Nokia N900 Necromancy

Denial of service and source code exposure in React Server Components

Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free

The highest quality codebase

An SVG is all you need

Litestream VFS

Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

My Father's Instant Mashed Potatoes

Laying out the 404 Media zine

Pdsink: USB Power Delivery Sink library for embedded devices

The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void

Show HN: Sim – Apache-2.0 n8n alternative

Craft software that makes people feel something

The Invisible Cost: From Creator to Consumer

The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI Partner on Sora

Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight

Cadmium Zinc Telluride: The wonder material powering a medical 'revolution'

Almond (YC X25) Is Hiring SWEs and MechEs

Notes on Gamma

Stoolap: High-performance embedded SQL database in pure Rust

UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

French supermarket's Christmas advert is worldwide hit (without AI) [video]

EFF launches Age Verification Hub

My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)

Powder and stone, or, why medieval rulers loved castles

Launch HN: BrowserBook (YC F24) – IDE for deterministic browser automation

iPhone Typos? It's Not Just You – The iOS Keyboard Is Broken [video]

Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1

Prove It All Night: With no fame or fortune, what keeps a band onstage? (1999)