Ripgrep - Confessions of a father

[DrizztVD1]

Continuing the discussion from Rust beginner notes & questions:

Rust beginner notes & questions

Quite a bit! It is hard to reason about the interaction between flags. There are a lot of flags, and every time a new one is added, it's almost guaranteed that there is some interaction that wasn't anticipated. This one came up in the conversation above: there are two different implementations of search in ripgrep, where one operates over buffers and one operates over a single big slice. The latter doesn't have some features implemented, such as context handling. So one consequence of this is…

Rust beginner notes & questions

Forgive my ignorance, but is this mostly a result of some flags being basic primitives (ie bool, usize, etc)? I’m sure you’ve thought this through, but I’ll ask anyway: is there room to turn them into higher level types and attach some behavior to them that they can apply to the output? Or would that create its own abstraction spaghetti? Is there a particular method/fn that demonstrates the issue you’re describing?

Rust beginner notes & questions

Dunno. I mean, the technique you're describing is one I've employed many times over the years, so I'm not unfamiliar with it. To me, the complexity arises in the permutation of all possible flags. There are probably competing (but perhaps not fundamental) pressures from the reduction of code duplication, abstraction soup (as you say) and performance (printing must be fast). What I'm describing is emergent complexity in the interaction between different features. As such, there …

[DrizztVD1]

In this thread, @BurntSushi elaborates on what the non-ideal aspects of Ripgrep are. The thread title jokes about @BurntSushi as the father of Ripgrep.

[dylan.dpc]

I don't see a point of "slicing" that conversation into a separate thread and linking what was said there because there is no continuity and no points to actually discuss on. It is better if you share your opinion on the topic instead and we can carry forward from there.

[DrizztVD1]

How so? All the points are in the links above. In the original thread, there would be no way for an outsider to know about this topic other than reading most of the 150 posts.