String replace - Is Rust really slower than JavaScript?

Hi,
I want to reimplement some JavaScript Code using Rust. Since the JavaScript code use "replaceAll" for large Strings (~5MB) I compare the performance of Rust and JavaScript regarding replace.

You can find my code here:
https://github.com/gpfeifer/string-replace

It seems that JavaScript is faster in this case. Have I missed something?
Best regards
Gregor

1 Like

JavaScript's replaceAll is powered by its regex engine, while Rust's standard library includes only naive string matching.

Using the Rust regex crate makes the Rust version about 9 times faster on my machine:

use std::time::Instant;
use std::fs::{read_to_string};

fn main() {
    let text = read_to_string("../string.json").unwrap();
    let pattern = regex::Regex::new("http://localhost:35261/product").unwrap();
    let parse = Instant::now();
    let _result = pattern.replace_all(&text, "http://example.com/product");
    println!("Replace {} nanos", parse.elapsed().as_nanos());
}

(Or “only” 5 times faster if you include the time to compile the Regex.)

3 Likes

Is it possible to look at the codegen being used by the Javascript example?

The main difference between std's search-and-replace and regex's is that std doesn't have any vectorization in it to accelerate it for common cases. That isn't the complete story, but it probably explains observed differences 90% of the time.

I would suppose that something as sophisticated as Javascript's regex engine uses vectorization for such cases.

Wow! That was a quick and very, very helpful response. I need to compile the regex at runtime. Now the performance between Rust and JavaScript are the same in this special case - which is my expectation.

I think in Node.js you can roughly instrument v8 with :

const v8 = require('v8');
v8.setFlagsFromString('--code-comments --print-code');

I imagine Deno has a similar thing ?

@Charles5214 Please open a new thread.

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