ack-grep vs. grep
Following Daniel Bachhuber – The Zen of WordPress Development talk, I’ve started to explore this magical ack tool, a replacement for the native grep.
ack can be downloaded from the official and quite modest website called BetterThanGrep.com. ack is also available in all sorts of software repositories, and can be named ack-grep instead (due to a naming conflict).
ack is written in Perl, while grep is written is C. So why the heck does ack appear to be faster? Here are some test with the latest WordPress package.