Didn't need the complexity of regexes for this, and C++17 strikes a good balance between features and availability.
11 karma · joined July 9, 2025
It’s still early, but I’d like to evolve it to make those insights more actionable, maybe even link recent PRs, show how files evolved, or highlight ownership boundaries. Feedback like yours helps shape that, so thanks again.
Good shout on the cache folder. Right now it just lives locally (.gmap), so yeah adding it to .gitignore is the way to go for now. I’ve been thinking about better ways to handle it. maybe an XDG-compatible path or something configurable. If a better idea comes up, I’ll def switch to it.
Thanks for trying it out!
To benchmark, you can use hyperfine like this:
hyperfine 'rq C:\ ".png" --glob' 'es.exe .png' 'fd --type f png'
This compares rq, Everything CLI (es.exe), and fd.
rq is typically 3–7x faster than common alternatives, supports filters (size, date, type, regex, glob), and streams results as text or JSON. It’s designed for scripting and developer workflows.
Why not just use existing tools? • Windows Explorer: slow, not scriptable • PowerShell: Get-ChildItem is painfully slow • Everything: fast, but GUI-first • ripgrep: amazing, but focused on text content search
rq focuses on metadata-based search for files and directories on Windows.
Core challenges: 1. Handling Windows quirks like MAX_PATH and Unicode (rq uses \?\ paths and UTF-8 internally) 2. Efficient parallel traversal without burning CPUs 3. Adding powerful filters without making everything slow
Design highlights: • Custom thread pool built on Windows Thread Pool API • Directory traversal is fully parallel: each worker processes directories and queues subdirectories • CLI filters: size, extension, date, regex, glob, file type
Example usage: rq D:\ “*.png” –glob –min 1M –after 2024-01-01 –threads 8
Performance benchmark (1.2M files on NVMe SSD, Windows 11, Ryzen 7): • rq (8 threads): 3.2s • Everything CLI: 6.8s • PowerShell Get-ChildItem: ~40s
Lessons learned: • C17 is still great for high-performance tools • Windows APIs are powerful but painful for paths and Unicode • Thread pools beat raw threads for scalability • Avoid syscalls in the hot path for speed
Source: https://github.com/seeyebe/rq