I didn't really want to engage with your broader point. I do disagree with it, but only in a measure of degree, and that's hard to debate because it's perspecti

I didn't really want to engage with your broader point. I do disagree with it, but only in a measure of degree, and that's hard to debate because it's perspective and opinion oriented. If performance wasn't as important as you seem to imply, it's very unlikely that ripgrep would have gotten popular given that performance (and filtering) are its two more critical features. That is, that's what I hear from users the most: the like ripgrep because it's fast or because it filters or because of both. But on the smaller point, it is just factually untrue that GNU grep falls into the "performance will be looked at later" bucket. That was why I responded. This post is a classic about why GNU grep is fast, demonstrating that GNU grep definitely doesn't look like it wasn't optimized: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-August/019310.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-Aug... And then before that, there's this: https://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery.html https://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery....