The Treacherous Optimization (2006)

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39 points·mr_golyadkin··7 comments

The grep author coded with ASR-33 teletype. He didn't eat cheezels at his keyboard AFAIK or mumble. He is a highly educated mathematician.

G/RE/P is the instantiation of the regex model in UNIX, and comes from Ken Thompson directly. Its the same model in ed, and in sed, and awk.

A somewhat relevant read from the author: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-Aug...

Oh, the guys who came after may have feasted on pizza, but they are hardly the "original grep author" are they?

I imagine the author of grep, Ultimate Unix Geek, squinting at vi;

Either qualify "which grep" or define "author" because to me, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, not the translator.

I also do not believe that Ken Thompson is the author's ex-girlfriend.

New versions of grep just call regexec(3): https://github.com/apple-open-source-mirror/text_cmds/blob/9...

Eh, well... that's not gnu grep. Also you will notice a call to fastexec four lines above, which uses a somewhat specialized matcher that's not libc regex.

I am aware, Apple took it out a while sometime after Mac OS X Lion (presumably because it was GPL? This is the last I saw of it: https://github.com/apple-open-source-mirror/grep/commit/0b40...) fastexec is not called because Apple compiles with WITHOUT_FASTMATCH: https://github.com/apple-open-source-mirror/text_cmds/blob/9....

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