Nay, a tumblelog.

Searching for a string over Android’s source code:

grin (python)
real    1m3.039s
user    0m54.023s
sys     0m8.983s

rak (ruby)
real    1m19.087s
user    1m11.303s
sys     0m4.863s

ack (perl)
real    1m28.422s
user    0m17.359s
sys     0m7.343s

grep
real    4m23.916s
user    0m4.029s
sys     0m10.108s

Grin is fastest, but doesn’t format results as nicely as rak and ack. Grep, using the default options (grep -r myString ./) produces a ton of useless “No such file or directory” lines making the results almost impossible to read.

I ran these on an 8 core Mac Pro.