App::Rak – 21st century grep / find / ack / ag / rg on steroids

There is problem with nice modern Linux tools - they are not available on the generic servers and embedded boxes with you will likely use, or in the image someone else has given you etc. Therefore it is pointless (sorry for the strong term) to learn them, because they simply won't be available for when they are most needed. And learning new tools is not a free process, there are costs, mental and time.

Author of ripgrep here.

Very cool! It looks like Rak has a lot of nice features.

I will say that getting this thing built took some digging. Could you please add install/build instructions to the README? As it is, I had to go sleuthing through your CI setup to figure it out. On Archlinux, here's what I did:

    $ yay -S rakudo-bin
    $ export PATH="/usr/share/perl6/site/bin:$PATH"
    $ git clone https://github.com/lizmat/App-Rak
    $ cd App-Rak
    $ zef install .
    $ export PATH="$HOME/.raku/bin:$PATH"

I realize features and an expressive language is your main goal, but I wanted to see what it looked like from a perf perspective:

    $ git remote -v
    origin  git@github.com:rust-lang/rust (fetch)
    origin  git@github.com:rust-lang/rust (push)

    $ git rev-parse HEAD
    699f4a637ef382ea0716c72f60d0c1c4cd79df41

    $ time rg accelerated --files-with-matches
    compiler/rustc_target/src/spec/thumbv7em_none_eabi.rs
    src/llvm-project/lldb/source/Plugins/LanguageRuntime/ObjC/AppleObjCRuntime/AppleObjCTrampolineHandler.cpp
    src/llvm-project/llvm/docs/PDB/HashTable.rst

    real    0.126
    user    0.544
    sys     0.850
    maxmem  22 MB
    faults  0

    $ time rak accelerated --files-with-matches
    compiler/rustc_target/src/spec/thumbv7em_none_eabi.rs
    src/llvm-project/lldb/source/Plugins/LanguageRuntime/ObjC/AppleObjCRuntime/AppleObjCTrampolineHandler.cpp
    src/llvm-project/llvm/docs/PDB/HashTable.rst

    real    17.005
    user    2:07.88
    sys     8.866
    maxmem  1565 MB
    faults  0

I'm not totally clear on what kind of filtering `rak` does by default, so I also ran a search on a single plain text file:

    $ cd /dev/shm
    $ curl -LO https://burntsushi.net/stuff/opensubtitles/2018/en/sixteenth.txt.gz
    $ gunzip sixteenth.txt.gz
    $ time rg 'Sherlock Holmes' sixteenth.txt -c
    426

    real    0.068
    user    0.047
    sys     0.020
    maxmem  778 MB
    faults  0

    $ time rg 'Sherlock Holmes' sixteenth.txt -c --no-mmap
    426

    real    0.089
    user    0.026
    sys     0.063
    maxmem  14 MB
    faults  0

    $ time rak 'Sherlock Holmes' sixteenth.txt --count-only
    426 matches in 1 file

    real    48.236
    user    48.010
    sys     0.334
    maxmem  215 MB
    faults  0

    $ time grep 'Sherlock Holmes' sixteenth.txt -c
    426

    real    0.297
    user    0.233
    sys     0.063
    maxmem  14 MB
    faults  0

It is helpful for people who were paying attention to the perl community with any passing interest at any time in the past 20 years. It is not helpful for people who weren't. But the former describes a lot of people here.

This is probably a good default position for a random new tool that floats across hacker news, but there are plenty of situations where the benefits of having a tool (even if only in your local environment) outweigh the effort of learning it and getting it.

Raku embraces Unicode in a big way, and probably influenced this decision.

I wonder if keyboards in the future will settle on a way to provide access to more characters, than is currently common.