Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2003 17:58:53 -0700 From: David Schultz <das@FreeBSD.ORG> To: Sean Farley <sean-freebsd@farley.org> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Replacing GNU grep revisited Message-ID: <20030622005852.GB59673@HAL9000.homeunix.com> In-Reply-To: <20030621103502.K18572@thor.farley.org> References: <20030621103502.K18572@thor.farley.org>
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On Sat, Jun 21, 2003, Sean Farley wrote: > In January, Pedro Giffuni started a thread about replacing GNU's grep in > the system. Interestingly, I did not know about the grep thread on > hackers until later. James Howard had interjected in February with > mention that he had gotten patches to speed up freegrep. I had sent him > those patches in late January, but I have not heard from him since. > Hopefully, he is OK and just busy. > > I have placed the patches up on Geocities¹ for others to try out. They > get freegrep fairly close to the performance of GNU's grep. Also > included is a small patch to regex to squeak a bit more performance out > of it, but I am not certain if it actually helps or not. > > BTW, Postgres is using a newer version of the regex library--swiped from > TCL--that FreeBSD uses. It supports multibyte characters. Is it time > for an update? dds@ has expressed some interest in compiling the FSMs for regexps into native code, which would make it blazingly fast. See cvs-all@. 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.
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