Top all-time · #455
Andrew Gallant
Personal blog · blog.burntsushi.netprogrammingsystems
Andrew Gallant's personal blog at blog.burntsushi.net covers programming and systems. Since 2012, 125 different Hacker News readers have linked it 205 times, most often “Ripgrep is faster (2016)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-03, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 12 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog mainly for its ripgrep posts on how and why it is so fast, which commenters call detailed, practical performance engineering. Its posts on transducers, error handling and unwrap are also cited as recommended reading.
- Recommended for · 12 comments
- Commenters call the ripgrep posts detailed and interesting on how it is fast, and recommend the transducers post, the Go generics article and the error handling
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Ripgrep is faster (2016)34 people · 43 mentions · first linked 2018-06-06
- Ripgrep – A new command line search tool16 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2016-09-23
- Index 1.6B Keys with Automata and Rust (2015)16 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2018-09-04
- Error Handling in Rust12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2018-07-26
- Finite state machines as data structure for representing ordered sets and maps7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2015-11-12
- Regex Engine Internals as a Library5 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2023-07-05
- Error handling in Rust5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2015-05-14
- My FOSS Story5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-01-20
- Writing type parametric functions in Go4 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2013-04-06
- Using unwrap() in Rust is okay3 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2022-08-08
What Hacker News says?
Having read a great deal from him, I just want to confirm everything said about Andrew Gallant, and I absolutely trust him too! This blog post is a great testament to his human skills: https://blog.burntsushi.net/foss/
Comment linking /foss/
on “Rust Moderation Team Resigns”Submitted My FOSS Story as a story · 833 points
HN discussionYou might care to notice that the resignation was announced by Andrew Gallant—more commonly known as BurntSushi[1]—who is one of the most well-respected, talented, and prolific contributors in the wider Rust community. Amongst other things, they are the author of ripgrep[2], the regex[3] crate, and the byteorder[4] crate. They have multiple projects which are amongst the most-downloaded crates[5] in the Rust ecosyst…
Comment linking /about
on “Rust Moderation Team Resigns”Submitted Ripgrep – A new command line search tool as a story · 740 points
HN discussionI will be the oldest person on the bench for sure (almost 40... time flies!), and I'm nervous as hell. :) I will second Kragen in saying that there surely are many others like me, that has been inspired by your work. Oh and btw, it was the post on Automata, not ripgrep. This one https://blog.burntsushi.net/transducers/
Comment linking /transducers/
on “My FOSS Story”Submitted A byte string library for Rust as a story · 278 points
HN discussionNo. binaries: http://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/#installation
Comment linking /ripgrep/
on “Ripgrep – A new command line search tool”Submitted Finite state machines as data structure for representing ordered sets and maps as a story · 213 points
HN discussionI did. You just didn't like their costs. Which is reasonable. They do have costs. I just happen to think they are worth it. For analysis, it increases review time and increases the burden on contributors. The extent to which any one person can review all analyses isn't clear to me, and they would likely need to rely on contributors to self regulate them. But I would expect the maintainers to review them for some min…
Comment linking /ripgrep/
on “Rust is now overall faster than C in benchmarks”Submitted Using unwrap() in Rust is okay as a story · 212 points
HN discussionI've called the ugrep benchmarks into question, and I elaborated on it here (and this includes a frustrating exchange between myself and the ugrep author): https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/i6pfb2/ugrep_new_ultr... I've also re-run my original set of benchmarks[1] with ugrep included: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/benchsuite... [1] - https://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/
Comment linking /ripgrep/
on “Rga: Ripgrep, but also search in PDFs, E-Books, Office documents, zip, tar.gz”Submitted Index 1.6B Keys with Automata and Rust (2015) as a story · 174 points
HN discussionhttps://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/ explains in detail _how_ it's so fast, and is a great reading on practical performance engineering. The interface is nearly 1:1 with `ag` (and the older `ack`). One notable difference is that ag enables `--smart-case` by default, so it treats an all-lowercase pattern as case-insensitive, while `rg` doesn't, you need an explicit `rg -i`. (or set it in a config file, but I'd rather…
Comment linking /ripgrep/
on “Htop 3.0”Submitted Error handling in Rust as a story · 173 points
HN discussionJust want to add that the blog posts[1] detailing how and why ripgrep is able to beat other search tools are pretty interesting reading. [1] http://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/
Comment linking /ripgrep/
on “Vim after 15 Years”Submitted Syntax extensions and regular expressions for Rust as a story · 126 points
HN discussionLikely. The dude who developed ripgrep spent like 2 man-years on it full-time, apparently. Interesting (long, detailed) blog post about it: https://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/
Comment linking /ripgrep/
on “Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?”Submitted Ripgrep is faster (2016) as a story · 98 points
HN discussion> Those are things that you can do just as well in C. [..] But the benefit is not "speed", but "speed plus security". But nobody said otherwise? I don't understand your point. Speed + safety is indeed precisely the point. I would implore you to do your own comparative analysis by looking at the types of bugs reported for these search tools. (I can't do this for you. If I could, I would.) > What makes ripgrep fast (A…
Comment linking /ripgrep/
on “Rust 1.17”Submitted Rust and CSV parsing as a story · 95 points
HN discussionHere's a much more thorough post on why it's fast. mmap is only a small part of it (a bunch of the grep implementations mmap) http://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/
Comment linking /ripgrep/
on “Rust 1.17”Submitted My FOSS Story (2020) as a story · 86 points
HN discussionNo. I've written about why: https://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/ That blog is eight years old now, but still pretty accurate. For more details at the level of the regex engine, see: https://github.com/BurntSushi/rebar
Comment linking /ripgrep/
on “Notepad++ is 21 years old”Submitted Index 1.6B Keys with Automata and Rust (2015) as a story · 82 points
HN discussionCheck out this post for an in-depth analysis: https://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/
Comment linking /ripgrep/
on “Ripgrep 13.0”Submitted Regex Engine Internals as a Library as a story · 46 points
HN discussionThis post by the author is a great introduction to the techniques used in ripgrep https://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/
Comment linking /ripgrep/
on “Ripgrep 13.0”Submitted Syntax extensions and regular expressions for Rust (2014) as a story · 41 points
HN discussionYou might be interested in this blog post: https://blog.burntsushi.net/ripgrep/
Comment linking /ripgrep/
on “Ripgrep 13.0”Submitted Rust regex engine internals as a library as a story · 27 points
HN discussion
