So if you cripple ripgrep, to act like grep, it is not much faster. This is kind of obvious. Ripgrep is faster because it makes assumptions, that will hold true

So if you cripple ripgrep, to act like grep, it is not much faster. This is kind of obvious. Ripgrep is faster because it makes assumptions, that will hold true for a large part of its users. This is like saying "if I remove wings from a plane, then it won't go much faster than my car. So a plane is not technically faster than a car" Of course, users should know the difference between grep and ripgrep (especially with tweaks like .gitignore, which could be confusing if you don't know).