On Mon, 23 Jun 2003, David Schultz wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 22, 2003, Sean Farley wrote:
> > On Sat, 21 Jun 2003, David Schultz wrote:
> >
> > 2. GNU's grep is using libgnuregex. The speed-up by dds@ would not
> > be felt?
>
> I was referring to freegrep, which I thought used the native libregex.
Yes, it does. I was just confused.
> In any case, if freegrep solves problems that GNU grep has, has the
> features people care about, is competitive in terms of performance,
> and has no known major bugs, then I would have no objections to it.
> As long as there are good technical reasons to switch, licensing
> advantages and performance are the least critical issues in my mind.
> We're not talking about a factor of 2, right?
It varies. Simpler searches are handled within FreeGrep such as
expressions with "^", "$" or ".". This is how GNU grep searches so
quickly; it "cheats" before it falls-back to the regex library.
More complex searches can hit the regex library and slow FreeGrep down.
In those cases, the ones I have found, it is still below a factor of
two difference. I usually do tests on /usr/src. I have seen FreeGrep
take 1:10 while GNU's grep took 0:58.
Interesting. I found that GNU's grep actually finds a match for "grep
-ail freebsd /usr/ports/distfiles/*":
/usr/ports/distfiles/ezm3
ezm3 is a directory with a filename that contains FreeBSD in it.
Sean
-----------------------
sean-freebsd@farley.org