> Just use grep?
First though, let’s explore the brute force approach to the problem. We get this question a lot: “Why don’t you just use grep?” To answer that, let’s do a little napkin math using ripgrep on that 115 TB of content. On a machine with an eight core Intel CPU, ripgrep can run an exhaustive regular expression query on a 13 GB file cached in memory in 2.769 seconds, or about 0.6 GB/sec/core.<p>But you don't NEED to do this do you? I'm ALREADY in a repository, I just don't want to check out, say all of WebKit, I just need to find where a specific reference is defined.<p>Maybe, maybe on a really serious day do I need to search an entire organization. But hardly ever.<p>I have never, in over a decade ever, wanted sophisticated symbolic searching from GitHub code search, I just need remote grep.<p>Why is the code search not feature bisected into this 99% use case, and then the occasional global repository search, which can behave entirely differently?