When: Tuesday February 27, 4PM
Where: Kirk Auditorium
Abstract: Grep is a command line tool for searching the contents of files for a regular expression and printing lines that match. Tools like grep are commonly used to search plain text such as log files and code repositories in an ad hoc manner. As the size of code repositories has increased, the utility of faster searching has increased. In this talk I’ll discuss a tool I built called ripgrep, used in VS Code’s “Find in Files” feature, and the engineering challenges of making it fast. I’ll talk about parallelism, SIMD, amortizing allocation, glob matching and ripgrep’s regex engine.

Andrew has a MS in Computer Science from Tufts University. He is a core contributor to the Rust programming language, and wrote the regular expression library as well as the widely-used `ripgrep` tool, which you’ve likely used if you use VS Code. After a decade at Salesforce, he now works at Astral, developing (in Rust) the popular `ruff` code linter for Python.