Frawk: A fast, JITted, statically-typed AWK written in Rust

I tried this last year when I started writing a book with Rust cli tools like ripgrep, hck, sd, huniq, etc. Was impressed with the performance. Found a few syntax issues when I simply tried to run gawk one-liners I had with frawk and they were fixed by the author. Hope the project crosses version 1.0 soon.

One of my recent project requires a fast awk implementation, and I tried frawk and got surprised by how robust it is. Although eventually we chose <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;noyesno&#x2F;awka" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;noyesno&#x2F;awka</a> for better native awk script compatibility, it&#x27;s still wonderful to see a project incorporating recent advances of programming language implementation into the ancient awk.

Note: You can do many of these one-liners using tools that understand Python: Xonsh or Pyp. You won&#x27;t need to learn Awk -- let alone any non-standard dialect of Awk. It won&#x27;t be as fast as some Awk implementations (maybe), but you&#x27;ll have a gentle on-ramp and off-ramp to a more featureful programming language.<p>I think the problem with DSLs is when a problem only partially fits into what they can do.

Interesting (and a bit surprising) that the cranelift backend keeps up with LLVM backend reasonably well, especially with parallelism enabled <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ezrosent&#x2F;frawk&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;info&#x2F;performance.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ezrosent&#x2F;frawk&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;info&#x2F;performan...</a>

There is also goAWK[0], a re-implementation of AWK in Go.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;benhoyt&#x2F;goawk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;benhoyt&#x2F;goawk</a>

Drat:<p>&gt; To a first approximation, it is an implementation of the AWK language; many common Awk programs produce equivalent output when passed to frawk.<p>So it sounds like it&#x27;s (intentionally) not a drop in replacement. That&#x27;s probably reasonable in context but unfortunate in terms of making adoption harder.

In the example I noticed a PREPARE block in addition to the well known BEGIN and END blocks. After a few minutes of searching it appears to be frawk specific:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ezrosent&#x2F;frawk&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;info&#x2F;parallelism.md#aggregations" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ezrosent&#x2F;frawk&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;info&#x2F;paralleli...</a><p>&quot;Because the repeated map references are both annoying to write and inefficient to execute, frawk has a PREPARE block which executes in the worker threads at the end of its input&quot;

&gt; You will need to install Rust<p>Am I right in saying Rust can produce executables that can be run without any Rust runtime etc being on the target system? Why would you need to install Rust in cases like this?

&gt; Lack of support for structured CSV input data.<p>Alternative approach that can be used sometimes: use TSV (tab-separated values), which make parsing trivial and works great with a wide range of tools; conversion from CSV to TSV can be done with csvkit or similar.

There&#x27;s also this for the Python fans:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alecthomas&#x2F;pawk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;alecthomas&#x2F;pawk</a>

A bit offtopic, but has someone implemented a structured regex awk? I&#x27;m constantly hoping it will become a thing.

Neat tool! I like this is as a small example of SSA-based dataflow analysis.