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.

How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution

Palantir's secret weapon isn't AI – it's Ontology. An open-source deep dive

Japanese Woodblock Print Search

Show HN: Llama 3.1 70B on a single RTX 3090 via NVMe-to-GPU bypassing the CPU

A Botnet Accidentally Destroyed I2P

Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks

How far back in time can you understand English?

Scientists discover recent tectonic activity on the moon

Parse, Don't Validate and Type-Driven Design in Rust

zclaw: personal AI assistant in under 888 KB, running on an ESP32

The Internet Is Becoming a Dark Forest – and AI Is the Hunter

Two Bits Are Better Than One: making bloom filters 2x more accurate

CXMT has been offering DDR4 chips at about half the prevailing market rate

Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

EDuke32 – Duke Nukem 3D (Open-Source)

Forward propagation of errors through time

Toyota Mirai hydrogen car depreciation: 65% value loss in a year

Canvas_ity: A tiny, single-header <canvas>-like 2D rasterizer for C++

Finding forall-exists Hyperbugs using Symbolic Execution

Inputlag.science – Repository of knowledge about input lag in gaming

Acme Weather

I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over

What not to write on your security clearance form (1988)

Be wary of Bluesky

Personal Statement of a CIA Analyst

I Don't Like Magic

Permacomputing

Uncovering insiders and alpha on Polymarket with AI

A16z partner says that the theory that we’ll vibe code everything is wrong

Keep Android Open