> 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.
> I am apparently becoming extremely unpopular in these circles for expressing this opinion
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.
I don't really accept moral arguments that argue that one thing is a better use of one's free time than some other thing. Even the best cancer researchers have every right to use their free time to watch a movie or read fiction instead of working on solving problems, even though they could theoretically save human lives by doing so. If they get to, then surely people who write programmer tools to search files get to do whatever they want in their free time too.
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.
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.