My standard of evidence here is existence. There are many greps written in a "GC language," and none of them have a broad performance profile in the same catego

My standard of evidence here is existence. There are many greps written in a "GC language," and none of them have a broad performance profile in the same category as ripgrep (or other greps written in C and C++). > This is no different in concept than Python libraries implemented in native languages. If that's true, then why isn't there a fast grep written in Python? IMO, it's for the same reason that tools like csvkit are slow. Once you get to the boundary between GC and non-GC, some kind of cost gets paid. Now maybe Python is paying higher costs here than your hypothetical language, but who knows. Without actual existence, I find this sort of hypothetical to be very uncompelling. It's too broad of a stroke.