> 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 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.