It's a lot faster. See http://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep http://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep. > Notably absent from this list is ack. We don’t benchmark it her

It's a lot faster. See http://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep http://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep. > Notably absent from this list is ack. We don’t benchmark it here because it is outrageously slow. Even on the simplest benchmark (a literal in the Linux kernel repository), ack is around two orders of magnitude slower than ripgrep. It’s just not worth it.