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Comment by Simplicitas | Hacker News Reader

Great to have alternatives, but wish there was a “Why” section in readme

Right, does it do things faster? Or somehow more efficiently?

It seems that this is probably slower and consumes far more resources than cat. It also does pretty printing and syntax highlighting. From a Unix standpoint, I would say this is not a cat replacement but a pretty replacement.

I just tried both gat and bat to see if they could really replace cat (spoiler: they cannot — unlike cat they soak up all input before outputting anything, and crash with out of memory very quickly).

A cat alternative would have to handle this correctly:

  $ </dev/zero cat >/dev/null

or it's not really a cat alternative. (Yes, variations on this theme are very useful in scripts and daily shell hacking).

That's wild given that Go makes it harder to read a whole file than read a block at a time.

Oh, absolutely not! ioutil.ReadFile and you're done!

At least we know the problem and the solution to it

Here is where the file is read in its entirety. https://github.com/koki-develop/gat/blob/c16dbf999b89b46ed17...

Wow, I would expect handling streaming properly to be the default case

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