Just-in-Time Compiling Ruby Regexps on TruffleRuby

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1. Just-in-Time Compiling Ruby Regexps on TruffleRuby Benoit Daloze and Josef Haider
2. Presenters Benoit Daloze TruffleRuby lead Twitter: @eregontp GitHub: @eregon Josef Haider TRegex creator and maintainer GitHub: @djoooooe 1 Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates
3. TruffleRuby • A high-performance Ruby implementation • Uses the JIT Compiler • Targets full compatibility with CRuby 2.7, including C extensions • GitHub: oracle/truffleruby, Twitter: @TruffleRuby, website: graalvm.org/ruby 2 Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates
4. Background: Regexp Engines in TruffleRuby • CRuby uses Onigmo (Oniguruma), backtracking regexp engine supporting 30 encodings • TruffleRuby initially used Joni, which is a port of Onigmo to Java by JRuby developers • Similar performance to Onigmo in CRuby • TruffleRuby already JIT compiles "small languages of Ruby" like array.pack("C*") and "%f" % pi, but not yet Regexps • It would be great if TruffleRuby would also run Regexps faster! 3 Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates
5. A Wild TRegex Appeared! 4 Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates
6. TRegex • Regular expression engine based on state machines, more specifically "deterministic finite automata" (DFA) • states have transitions to successor states • every transition has a set of accepted symbols/characters state 1 start state 2 a 5 Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates
7. Regular Expressions and Finite State Machines • Regular expressions used to be perfectly representable as state machines, but were extended later • Basic concepts can still be mapped to state machines directly • Concatenation: /ab/ 1 start 2 3 a b Automaton model of /ab/ 6 Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates
8. Regular Expressions and Finite State Machines • Disjunction: /ab|ac/ 1 start 2 4 3 5 a a b c (a) NFA model of /ab|ac/ 1 start 2,3 4 5 a b c (b) DFA model of /ab|ac/ 7 Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates
9. Regular Expressions and Finite State Machines • Quantifiers: /a*b+/ 1 start 2 a b b Automaton model of /a*b+/ 8 Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates
10. Regular Expressions and Finite State Machines • Capture groups: annotated transitions. 1 start 2 3 4 5 6 a, (0 b, (1 c d, (1 / 0, 0)&1) / 0, 0)&1) Automaton model of /a(bc|d)/ 9 Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates
11. What is supported? • Concatenation “ab” • Disjunction “|” • Infinite Quantifiers “*”, ”+” • Capture Groups “()”, “(?<name>)” • Character Classes “[]”, “\p{}” • Counted Quantifiers “?”, “{n,m}” (partially) • Anchors “^”, “$”, “\A”, “\Z”, “\b”, “\B” • Lookahead Assertions “(?=)” • Lookbehind Assertions “(?<=)” (partially) 10 Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates
12. What is not supported yet? • Back-References “\1, \k<name>” in the Regexp (not in replacement strings: #gsub) • Negative Lookahead “(?!)” • Negative Lookbehind “(?<!)” • Recursive Subexpression Calls “\g<name>” like “(?<sqbr>[\g<sqbr>*])” • Possessive Quantifiers “*+”, “++”, “?+”, “{n,m}+” • Atomic Groups “(?>)” • Conditionals “(?(group))” • Absent Expressions “(?~)” 11 Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates
13. Just-In-Time-Compiling regular expressions @ExplodeLoop(MERGE_EXPLODE) def execute(input, index = 0) result = -1 ip = 0 outer: loop do current_state = STATES[ip] result = index if current_state.final_state? return result if index >= input.size c = input[index] index += 1 current_state.each_transition do |transition| if transition.match?(c) ip = transition.target_ip goto :outer end end return result end end 12 Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates
14. Just-In-Time-Compiling regular expressions def execute(input, index = 0) # /a+(b|c)/ state0: return -1 if index >= input.size c = input[index] index += 1 if c == 'a' then goto :state1 else goto :state0 end state1: return -1 if index >= input.size c = input[index] index += 1 if c == 'a' then goto :state1 elsif c == 'b' || c == 'c' then goto :state2 else goto :state0 end state2: return index end 0 start 1 2 [^a] a a [^abc] [bc] 13 Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates
15. Performance Results We use the benchmark-ips gem to measure peak performance and compare: • TruffleRuby+TRegex on GraalVM JVM CE • TruffleRuby+Joni on GraalVM JVM CE • CRuby 2.7 14 Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates
16. Micro-Benchmarks for "abc".match?(Regexp) /def/ /abc/ /./ /[a-z]/ /[0-9]/ 0 10 20 30 40 Speedup relative to CRuby CRuby 2.7 TruffleRuby+Joni TruffleRuby+TRegex 15 Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates
17. Larger Regexp Benchmarks • liquid parse: Liquid::Template.new.parse(cart_template), so the parsing part of the Liquid template language, and that parser uses Regexps heavily • browser sniffer: from Shopify/browser_sniffer, a gem to detect which browser, OS, versions, etc are used from the user agent using Regexps • regex redux (no IO): a benchmark from the Computer Language Benchmarks Game which reads 50MB of DNA/RNA sequences and transforms them using regexps (gsub!, scan) • syslog: a benchmark parsing a single log line according to the BSD syslog Protocol (RFC 3164) 16 Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates
18. Larger Regexp Benchmarks liquid parse browser sniffer regex redux syslog 0 2 4 6 8 1 3 5 7 9 Speedup relative to CRuby CRuby 2.7 TruffleRuby+Joni TruffleRuby+TRegex 17 Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates
19. ReDoS and Catastrophic Backtracking • ReDoS in Rails in 2021: CVE-2021-22880 Feb 10, CVE-2021-22902 and CVE-2021-22904 May 5 (2/4). • TRegex always matches in linear time, no risk of ReDoS with TRegex! • When falling back to Joni / backtracking, TruffleRuby can emit warnings (--warn-slow-regex): file.rb: warning: Regexp /(?!...)/ requires backtracking and might not match in linear time 18 Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates
20. Atomic Groups • Atomic groups cannot be easily supported by finite-state machines regex engines • Most usages of atomic groups seem workarounds for excessive backtracking. In that case, it is safe to ignore such groups for TRegex. • Atomic groups can also be used for semantics (seems rare): /"(?>.*)"/ =~ '"Quote"' # => nil • Approach: be optimistic and assume atomic groups are used for performance, not for semantics. TruffleRuby has an option to disable this behavior. 19 Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates
21. Conclusion • Using finite-state machines for Regexp matching is faster than backtracking and safer • TruffleRuby and TRegex can compile Ruby Regexps to machine code and inline them together with Ruby code • On the presented benchmarks, TruffleRuby+TRegex is faster than CRuby by 24x-41x for regexp micro-benchmarks and 2.3x-9x for larger regexp benchmarks • TruffleRuby can warn when Regexps are at risk of catastrophic backtracking (ReDoS) 20 Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates
22. Acknowledgments • Jirka Maršík (@jirkamarsik) for adding support for the many features of Ruby Regexps in TRegex, and most of the integration of TRegex in TruffleRuby • Duncan MacGregor (@aardvark179) for various optimizations related to Regexp matching (StringScanner, gsub, accessing $~ in the C API, etc) • Kevin Menard (@nirvdrum) for further optimizations, notably to enable splitting and inlining of regexps 21 Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates