Replacing GNU grep revisited

[David Schultz]

On Sun, Jun 22, 2003, Sean Farley wrote:
> On Sat, 21 Jun 2003, David Schultz wrote:
> 
> > dds@ has expressed some interest in compiling the FSMs for regexps
> > into native code, which would make it blazingly fast.  See cvs-all at .
> > As a practical matter, there are only a couple of zealots who care
> > what kind of license grep is under, so replacing GNU grep with
> > something that's ``almost as good as GNU grep'' is a regression IMO.
> > If we were talking about a kernel module or library, of course, that
> > would be a different matter.
> 
> Let me clarify.  As far as I have been able to find out, the big
> hold-out on not considering FreeGrep was that it was too slow.  I got
> the time to be comparable.
> 
> Reasons to consider for switching:
> 1. GNU's grep -r option "is broken" according to the following post.
>    The only thing I have noticed is that FreeGrep has more options for
>    controlling how symbolic links are traversed.
>    http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=lang_en&ie=UTF-8&selm=xzp7kchblor.fsf_flood.ping.uio.no%40ns.sol.net

Sure, that sounds like a valid reason to switch.  As others have
pointed out, though, freegrep is not without problems.  

> 2. GNU's grep is using libgnuregex.  The speed-up by dds@ would not be
>    felt?

I was referring to freegrep, which I thought used the native libregex.

In any case, if freegrep solves problems that GNU grep has, has
the features people care about, is competitive in terms of
performance, and has no known major bugs, then I would have no
objections to it.  As long as there are good technical reasons to
switch, licensing advantages and performance are the least
critical issues in my mind.  We're not talking about a factor of 2, right?