Just a small follow-up: Oh, I think I missed the fact that grl is spawning processes and not threads. That's very interesting. With respect to extra syscalls,

Just a small follow-up: Oh, I think I missed the fact that grl is spawning processes and not threads. That's very interesting. With respect to extra syscalls, ripgrep is actually doing a lot more stat'ing than you might expect because it is "recursive" by default. So for each file it gets, it has to at least check if it's a directory. And there's some symlink behavior to handle. I think I can get rid of one of them per file given, and others are harder because of abstraction boundaries. Sigh. Anyway, that could be impacting an I/O-only comparison here as well.