What does HackerNews think of awk?

One true awk

Language: C

Perl first commit: a “replacement” for Awk and sed | Jul 2023
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Right, "the one true awk" corresponds to a book written in 1988, very explicity. https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk

I was incorrect about 30 years. It's actually 35.

You were the one that that said POSIX awk to begin with, I was using your terms. I understand what you meant, why don't you?

As far as shitting on the GMU tools, I don't think I've seen someone do that in decades, especially just referencing the bottom of the man page like that.

As far as speed, I don't know how you're using these tools, but if gawk is your bottleneck and not i/o, there's probably smarter ways to do things.

This is not a productive conversation. You can live life however you want and if you're happy than I'm happy. We are definitely at an impasse. I'm off to bed.
Frawk: A fast, JITted, statically-typed AWK written in Rust | Feb 2022
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>There's tons of incompatible dialects. I think that shows the problem with what you're saying.

To my knowledge the major dialects in use are:

- One True Awk (aka bwk) (https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk) - this one is bundled in all *BSD/macOS

- Gawk (https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/) - this one is bundled in most Linux

- mawk (https://invisible-island.net/mawk/) - bundled in some Linux distros (?), known as the fastest byte-code compiled implementation.

All three have very good compatibility, but Gawk is super-set over POSIX standard. I have some evidence here, since I regularly test [1] against these implementations and even some others, like GoAWK.

[1] https://github.com/xonixx/makesure/actions/runs/1830978431
Awk: `Begin { ` Part 1 | Oct 2020
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Happy to see this mentions https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk
The State of the AWK | May 2020
We have a tool at work, that is forked from https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk, for the binary serialization of one of our proprietary in-house protocols, which has hundreds of record types.

I am blown away by how elegant the result is.

Why you should learn just a little Awk (2010) | Jun 2018
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Updated, but still the original:

https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk