Re: [dev] off topic - awk versions performance comparison

On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 05:28:53AM +0200, Uriel wrote:
>Interesting, I thought they had done a sync more recently *sigh* And
>did't know about the completely different regexp engine.
>
>I'm a bit surprised because in my experience I had found that if
>anything Plan 9 awk's seemed to err more on the side of leaving things
>the way they were upstream, for example system() uses ksh instead of
>rc.

As far as I know, the only parts of the base system that don't
use Rob's engine are grep, which uses Ken's, and lex. I suspect
that it would have been more trouble than it was worth to adapt
awk's engine to use UTF-8. It's an especially good algorithm,
but it's character-based throughout, and it's especially hoary
in its bowels. It would have probably had to be almost rewritten
to add multibyte support. In the end, they just opted to
translate AWK syntax to Plan 9 syntax and use libregex instead.

-- 
Kris Maglione
i've wondered whether Linux sysfs should be called syphilis
	--forsyth