You're assuming way too much bad faith here. The article tries very hard to make a fair comparison, and doesn't throw dirt on grep at any point. It's pretty clear that the intention of the author was to write a search tool with particular characteristics, and it turned out that that choice was faster than grep.

I think you're extrapolating from the name of the crate -- as steve said, the name is not "R.I.P. grep", and the intention was not to replace grep.

Go through the post again with this in mind. Does it sound at all combative to you? It's purely technical, and fairly explains everything.

One of the delightful aspects of this entire HN thread is the interchange between the authors of rg and ag with regard to burntsushi's detailed explanation of the tradeoffs involved, and how the ag author considers making some changes based on learning and philosophy detailed by burntsushi. This interchange is a great bazaar moment in the sense that new ground was staked out. If the proposed moral obligation would be to simply contribute PRs to existing projects (for a slew of philosophical architectural and features differences like Unicode support, etc.), then innovation slows to a crawl because of passivity constraints, bikeshedding, etc.

If you have the talent and capacity to build a better alternative, and share it openly, and explain it so well, as burntsushi has in this domain, then the only moral imperative I see is that you should do so.

But I did! Have you looked at the dependency list of ripgrep? It's utterly filled with tons of tools that you can pick out and use in other projects for any purpose you like. I didn't mention this in the blog post because there's already too much there, but sure, here they are:

memchr - Fast single byte search: http://burntsushi.net/rustdoc/memchr/

walkdir - Recursive directory iterator: http://burntsushi.net/rustdoc/walkdir/

utf8-ranges - Generate utf8 automata: http://burntsushi.net/rustdoc/utf8_ranges/

regex-syntax - A regex parser (including literal extraction helpers): https://doc.rust-lang.org/regex/regex_syntax/index.html

regex - The regex engine itself: https://doc.rust-lang.org/regex/regex/index.html

grep - Line-by-line search (as a library). This is where all of the inner literal optimizations happen, for example. http://burntsushi.net/rustdoc/grep/

And this is only the stuff that I did. This doesn't count all the other wonderful stuff I used that other folks built!

And sure, I could do better. There's more stuff I could move into the `grep` crate, but this is only the beginning, not the end.

> "hey, this is something I've been working on: would you consider making grep the first standalone tool to move to Rust, and what would it take from me to make this happen?"

But I didn't want to do that. I don't understand why that's a problem. Doing this requires being POSIX interface compatible, and that's not a hole I care to dig. I don't mean any disrespect, it's just not what I want to spend my time doing.

> as opposed to writing an article about how "I am smarter than the GNU grep people for these reasons and have built a tool named after how my tool is going to kill their tool" which almost seems to go out of its way to set up an air of competition rather than collaboration

I'm really sorry if I came across that way. It was of course not my intention. My intention was to write about what I had learned, which seems like a pretty fundamental component of collaboration. I'm sure five years from now, when I've moved on to other problems, someone will come along and beat ripgrep, and I can only hope that they write about it. :-)

I mean, if it weren't for the innumerable people who wrote about their experience with this kind of stuff, I never would have been able to get here. It only makes sense for me to write if I think I have something valuable to share.

> (I mean: seriously... "ripgrep"?! This developer is clearly going out of their way to be combative.

I'm not. "rip" was supposed to mean "rip through text." I'm sorry it came off as combative. I wasn't even aware of the "rest in peace" interpretation until someone else pointed it out.

Honestly... I was trying hard to find a way to justify the binary name `rg` because I liked that `r` could stand for Rust. But `rustgrep` seemed a bit too in-your-face, so I started searching for small relevant words starting with `r`. That's it.

Honestly, I'm not sure that trying to contribute to grep would even be worthwhile. You've got a few cases where ripgrep is faster than grep, but to submit patches to grep to fix it for those cases would be an enormous amount of effort, and either require you to rewrite a whole bunch of Rust code in C or the grep maintainers to accept patches in Rust, neither of which seem like great ideas. What you have done is advance the state of the art in search tools, as well as provide lots of building blocks to the Rust community for other developers to get great behavior out of their own programs. (Incidentally this is one thing I love about Rust--it's very straightforward for someone to write a crate that implements something in an extremely optimized way but still presents an easy-to-use API for other developers.)

I haven't had an opportunity to use many of your crates in my Rust development yet (except byteorder!) but I'm excited that they exist and I can definitely see myself using them in the future.

I contend that the world would be a much better place if instead of someone building a new tool which beats yours, they worked to improve your tool (which, at the point where you moved on, would hopefully have been granted to a body of separate maintainers, whether people you find or a group such as Apache which specializes in maintaining valuable open source projects). Sure: a world where people write about what they do is better than a world where they don't, but that's a really depressing thing to be "hoping for".

I am apparently becoming extremely unpopular in these circles for expressing this opinion, but a really important aspect of open source was about people collaborating towards a common effort to build high quality software: to avoid working together, to even expect that people will or should continually build new projects from scratch that "compete" with each other, defeats many (if not even most) of the benefits of open source software, as it relegates us to the same process by which closed source software improves.

> But I didn't want to do that. I don't understand why that's a problem. Doing this requires being POSIX interface compatible, and that's not a hole I care to dig. I don't mean any disrespect, it's just not what I want to spend my time doing.

Providing some of the parts, or an offer to help, goes a long way: you don't have to do all of the work (and others wouldn't expect that); also, it is worth noting that GNU grep has on occasion added alternative backends (whether "extended" expressions or later using PCRE), and often have made improvements or added features. The assumption that grep is a tool which works the way it does and which will always do what it does, and that improvements should come in the form of competition, is demotivating to contribution.

To be really clear: I don't think your opinion is necessarily the problem. When I first read your comment, I typed up a response that I wasn't proud of. It wasn't nice because your comment wasn't nice. I had to step away from the computer and take a moment to put things back into focus to give you the response I did. It wasn't easy.

And really, my reaction to your comment had nothing to do with your opinion that we should try to collaborate more. That's a completely reasonable thing to hope for. But some of the things you said, or implied (about me personally), were really way way off, and I personally found them pretty insulting.

I get that you took my blog post as combative, so maybe you think the same about me. But you didn't ask for clarification, you just kind of dove right into the insults and assumptions and bad faith, and personally, I think that is just a really awful way to interact with other humans.

It's clear that we have different valuations on how to spend our time, and I really don't appreciate your implicit condescension. I also don't appreciate you telling me how I should spend my time. My free time is precious, and I want to spend it doing the things I find interesting. I don't want to work on a legacy code base, in C and spend enormous social resources pushing on one of the most established C projects in existence to switch to a new programming language. That does not sound like fun to me, and I want to work on something fun in my free time. `ripgrep` happened to be it. (N.B. Fun is not the only criterion, but it's a big one.)

> but a really important aspect of open source was about people collaborating towards a common effort to build high quality software

I've spent a huge portion of my free time in the past 2.5 years contributing to the Rust ecosystem. If that's not collaborating towards a common effort, then I don't know what is. `ripgrep` itself is barely a blip in that effort. All the stuff that went into building `ripgrep` that is freely available as other libraries? Yeah, that took a while.

The author chose to spend his time writing his own file searching tool instead of trying to work with GNU. That's his call.

He just gave a laundry list of parts which grep or any other tool could use, and gives a thorough explanation of what benefits each one gets you in the blog post.

He's also having a seemingly productive discussion with the ag author on HN, which could result in ag sharing components.

Ripgrep seems to be a fun side project for the author. Making it posix compatible and getting involved in the politics of changing the language and algorithms of a major tool might not be considered fun by the author. This is totally reasonable. Especially given that Rust isn't really the reason why rg is fast -- justifying Rust is harder in this case. But if you like Rust (and not C/++), then it's even less fun to work on a C/++ codebase.

The blog post is written in a way that any tool can pick up the same perf improvements if it wishes (often by just picking up a dependency). The author has been collaborative, not combative, with the ag author here (and presumably with other tool maintainers if they come forth). This is very much in the spirit of open source, since even if things superficially compete they still can share code and ideas. You're being very unreasonable here.

It's a bridge to far to directly attack people just for working on an open-source project, but the creator of this project did not do that, obviously.

If neither condition holds, then the use of Rust is almost purely incidental. It isn't even interesting, from that perspective. Far more interesting would be a measure of how safe the Rust code is versus equivalent-results implementations in other languages.

But of course, as we all know, performance isn't everything. Even ripgrep itself accepts a performance penalty in its default mode of operation, in order to improve the relevance of results shown.

I did try to explain why I think ripgrep is faster in all kinds of gory details though. :-)