On Friday, May 11, 2018 11:44:04 Steven Schveighoffer via Digitalmars-d- announce wrote: > Shameful note: Macos grep is BSD grep, and is not NEARLY as fast as GNU > grep, which has much better performance (and is 2x as fast as > iopipe_search on my Linux VM, even when printing line numbers).
Curiously, the grep on FreeBSD seems to be GNU's grep with some additional patches, though I expect that it's a ways behind whatever GNU is releasing now, because while they were willing to put some GPLv2 stuff in FreeBSD, they have not been willing to have anything to do with GPLv3. FreeBSD's grep claims to be version 2.5.1-FreeBSD, whereas ports has the gnugrep package which is version 2.27, so that implies a fairly large version difference between the two. I have no idea how they compare in terms of performance. Either way, I would have expected FreeBSD to be using their own implementation, not something from GNU, especially since they seem to be trying to purge GPL stuff from FreeBSD. So, the fact that FreeBSD is using GNU's grep is a bit surprising. If I had to guess, I would guess that they switched to the GNU version at some point in the past, because it was easier to grab it than to make what they had faster, but I don't know. Either way, it sounds like Mac OS X either didn't take their grep from FreeBSD in this case, or they took it from an older version before FreeBSD switching to using GNU's grep. - Jonathan M Davis
