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Mushrat "best in class"

Created: 2022-04-26

For the mushrat lang/tool, what does it mean to be "best-in-class" for file handling, string manipulation, etc?

  1. Excellent "api" - the language should make it FAST (and hopefully at least somewhat intuitive) to do the common tasks

  2. Make it possible to do hard tasks (and, again, hopefully intuitive)

  3. Performance should be near specialized tools like RipGrep, etc.

One thing that recently surprised me was the performance of UNIX pipes vs single script (Ruby/Perl). Pipes can beat single script because tools like sort can not only run SMP, but can also "spill to disk" when they run out of RAM. I got this from the book Designing Data-Intensive Applications, which is chock-full of powerful knowledge.