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.

Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition

How does misalignment scale with model intelligence and task complexity?

The Codex App

Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

GitHub experience various partial-outages/degradations

xAI joins SpaceX

The Connection Machine CM-1 "Feynman" T-shirt

Todd C. Miller – Sudo maintainer for over 30 years

Carnegie Mellon Unversity Computer Club FTP Server

The TSA's New $45 Fee to Fly Without ID Is Illegal

See how many words you have written in Hacker News comments

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2026)

Hacking Moltbook

Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

Archive.today is directing a DDoS attack against my blog?

4x faster network file sync with rclone (vs rsync) (2025)

Linux From Scratch ends SysVinit support

Firefox Getting New Controls to Turn Off AI Features

Training a trillion parameter model to be funny

Julia

Joedb, the Journal-Only Embedded Database

Banning lead in gas worked. The proof is in our hair

G Lang – A lightweight interpreter written in D (2.4MB)

Nano-vLLM: How a vLLM-style inference engine works

On being sane in insane places (1973) [pdf]

Advancing AI Benchmarking with Game Arena

The largest number representable in 64 bits

GitHub discusses giving maintainers control to disable PRs

Pretty soon, heat pumps will be able to store and distribute heat as needed

Geologists may have solved mystery of Green River's 'uphill' route