I'm the author. People are asking how this thing is faster than ack or grep. Here's how: - Literal matches use Boyer-Moore-Horspool strstr.[1] - Files are mma

I'm the author. People are asking how this thing is faster than ack or grep. Here's how: - Literal matches use Boyer-Moore-Horspool strstr.[1] - Files are mmap()ed instead of read into a buffer. - If you're building with PCRE 8.21 or greater, regex searches use the JIT compiler.[2] Also I call pcre_study() before executing the regex on a jillion files. - Ag reads your .gitignore and .hgignore files to ignore code you don't care about. - Instead of calling fnmatch() on every pattern in your ignore files, non-regex patterns are loaded into an array and binary searched. I wrote a couple of blog posts about profiling The Silver Searcher and improving performance. http://geoff.greer.fm/2012/01/23/making-programs-faster-profiling/ http://geoff.greer.fm/2012/01/23/making-programs-faster-prof... is the most informative one, IMO. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer%E2%80%93Moore%E2%80%93Horspool_algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer%E2%80%93Moore%E2%80%93Hor... 2. http://sljit.sourceforge.net/pcre.html http://sljit.sourceforge.net/pcre.html