4 ms·

Anyone have a sense of how the new Ack 2.0 compares to The Silver Searcher[1] (aka Ag)? I've been using TSS for some time now and it's been completely awesome

Anyone have a sense of how the new Ack 2.0 compares to The Silver Searcher[1] (aka Ag)? I've been using TSS for some time now and it's been completely awesome in both performance and functionality compared to Ack v1. [1] https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

epmatsw 14y ago
It would be interesting to see benchmarks on this. I know TSS was faster before, and this release didn't seem to highlight any performance improvements.
- petdance 14y ago
  Chances are that if there are any performance changes, it might even be a decrease in speed because of having to find .ackrc files. We haven't gone profiling 2.0 yet, but that's near the top of our list.
  - epmatsw 14y ago
    That's pretty much what I figured. If we wait a bit, I wouldn't be surprised to see a writeup from Geoff, the author of Ag. His blog posts when he started development on it were really interesting. http://geoff.greer.fm/2011/12/27/the-silver-searcher-better-than-ack/ http://geoff.greer.fm/2011/12/27/the-silver-searcher-better-...
    - ggreer 14y ago
      When it comes to improving Ag's speed, there's not much more to write about. I've used every dirty trick I know: mmap()ed I/O, threads, Boyer-Moore-Horspool strstr(), PCRE-JIT, etc. Now when I profile, Ag spends the majority of its time reading files off disk. On most systems, this is true even if the files have been cached in memory by the OS. The limiting factor is memory bandwidth. Anyways, I don't really have the time for long analysis posts these days. I'm busy working on something that captures value in addition to creating it. :)
burke 14y ago
No mention of mmap in the ack release notes, so I'd imagine ag is still much faster.
Groxx 14y ago
sounds great - thanks! I hadn't heard of this before
cpeterso 14y ago
I had never heard of The Silver Searcher. Thanks! A test search of a huge codebase (Firefox) took 38 seconds with ack, but only 17 with ag! After my page cache had been warmed up, ack then took 10 seconds and ag only took 3. That said, I am using ack 1.96, not ack 2.0. $ brew uninstall ack
- petdance 14y ago
  It's OK to have two similar tools in your toolbox. When you need the --output option, for example, you use ack. When you want crazy speed, you use ag. You don't have to choose one over the other. That's why I changed the name from "betterthangrep.com" to "beyondgrep.com". There's no need to have a ranking of "I use this over that."
  - __david__ 14y ago
    Ah, you Perl guys and your "there's more than one way to do it". :-) Disclaimer: I'm a Perl guy and I agree.
- petdance 14y ago
  Also, take a look at http://beyondgrep.com/more-tools/ http://beyondgrep.com/more-tools/. There are a dozen other tools on there as well that you might well like as much as ack and ag. An abundance of tools is good.
- jdhore 14y ago
  I've contributed to ag and followed it quite closely. That being said, I still have ack on all my systems because sometimes, being able to just do: ack --python search-term is REALLY useful.
  - lloeki 14y ago
    Turning things around, I often have SQL dumps around, so ack --no-sql is a real lifesaver in my Rails (i.e ruby, coffee, less, shell and whatnot) projects.
masklinn 14y ago
Though I've switched to ag, I still miss Ack's selection and deselection flags. Those are much sweeter than ag's -g and -G and it looks like they've improved further
- pyre 14y ago
  As mentioned above, there's no need to have 'one search tool to rule them all.' You don't uninstall grep from your system when installing ag or ack.
  - petdance 14y ago
    > You don't uninstall grep Beautiful. Thank you. I am stealing that for when I discuss this in other places.

epmatsw 14y ago

It would be interesting to see benchmarks on this. I know TSS was faster before, and this release didn't seem to highlight any performance improvements.

petdance 14y ago
Chances are that if there are any performance changes, it might even be a decrease in speed because of having to find .ackrc files. We haven't gone profiling 2.0 yet, but that's near the top of our list.
- epmatsw 14y ago
  That's pretty much what I figured. If we wait a bit, I wouldn't be surprised to see a writeup from Geoff, the author of Ag. His blog posts when he started development on it were really interesting. http://geoff.greer.fm/2011/12/27/the-silver-searcher-better-than-ack/ http://geoff.greer.fm/2011/12/27/the-silver-searcher-better-...
  - ggreer 14y ago
    When it comes to improving Ag's speed, there's not much more to write about. I've used every dirty trick I know: mmap()ed I/O, threads, Boyer-Moore-Horspool strstr(), PCRE-JIT, etc. Now when I profile, Ag spends the majority of its time reading files off disk. On most systems, this is true even if the files have been cached in memory by the OS. The limiting factor is memory bandwidth. Anyways, I don't really have the time for long analysis posts these days. I'm busy working on something that captures value in addition to creating it. :)

burke 14y ago

No mention of mmap in the ack release notes, so I'd imagine ag is still much faster.

Groxx 14y ago

sounds great - thanks! I hadn't heard of this before

cpeterso 14y ago

I had never heard of The Silver Searcher. Thanks! A test search of a huge codebase (Firefox) took 38 seconds with ack, but only 17 with ag! After my page cache had been warmed up, ack then took 10 seconds and ag only took 3. That said, I am using ack 1.96, not ack 2.0. $ brew uninstall ack

petdance 14y ago
It's OK to have two similar tools in your toolbox. When you need the --output option, for example, you use ack. When you want crazy speed, you use ag. You don't have to choose one over the other. That's why I changed the name from "betterthangrep.com" to "beyondgrep.com". There's no need to have a ranking of "I use this over that."
- __david__ 14y ago
  Ah, you Perl guys and your "there's more than one way to do it". :-) Disclaimer: I'm a Perl guy and I agree.
petdance 14y ago
Also, take a look at http://beyondgrep.com/more-tools/ http://beyondgrep.com/more-tools/. There are a dozen other tools on there as well that you might well like as much as ack and ag. An abundance of tools is good.
jdhore 14y ago
I've contributed to ag and followed it quite closely. That being said, I still have ack on all my systems because sometimes, being able to just do: ack --python search-term is REALLY useful.
- lloeki 14y ago
  Turning things around, I often have SQL dumps around, so ack --no-sql is a real lifesaver in my Rails (i.e ruby, coffee, less, shell and whatnot) projects.

masklinn 14y ago

Though I've switched to ag, I still miss Ack's selection and deselection flags. Those are much sweeter than ag's -g and -G and it looks like they've improved further

pyre 14y ago
As mentioned above, there's no need to have 'one search tool to rule them all.' You don't uninstall grep from your system when installing ag or ack.
- petdance 14y ago
  > You don't uninstall grep Beautiful. Thank you. I am stealing that for when I discuss this in other places.