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Burntsushi, Andrew. My man. You don't know me, we have never talked but bro I admire the shit out of you.

Trolls are much louder than lurkers. There are a silent majority of us that know how much time and sweat goes into building free tools. We appreciate what you do because you do it for love of being a hacker and showing everyone else how you did it.

I don't think people realize how hard it is having a day job and then building a huge project people want to use. It's mentally taxing. It sucks even more when it's only negative things. Life is already hard man, why do these people have to keep trolling you? It's enough to make you want to flip the desk and give it all up.

I love reading your Rust code, and seeing how active you are on reddit/hacker news. Going through how you built the Aho Corasick crate and comments on you trying to reverse hyperscans teddy algo. was amazing for me. I spent so many hours that day reading ripgrep source code. I was amazed and what you did and the comments everywhere about why, like why the printer was pull/push. The whole time, I was geeking over what you did so much that you started my love of Rust.

Anyways, thanks for just being you man.



Burntsushi. Because of your blog post on ripgrep I found a love that I did not know I had (I am just a lowly self-taught frontend developer). I had no idea you could do magic like this with code, and that it could be that interesting. It made all the right wheels in my head spin and it was, and is, love.

I am going back to university (a place a swore never to return to) to learn about algorithms and algorithmic design, starting next Monday. Because of you.

Nobody has had this big an influence on my career, and every time I hit `rg` on my computer I do so with immense gratitude.

Just thought you should know.


Wow, that is some heavy praise! Thank you very much for the kind words. I wish you all the best with your return to university. :-)


I will be the oldest person on the bench for sure (almost 40... time flies!), and I'm nervous as hell. :)

I will second Kragen in saying that there surely are many others like me, that has been inspired by your work.

Oh and btw, it was the post on Automata, not ripgrep. This one https://blog.burntsushi.net/transducers/


There are probably dozens of people who have been similarly inspired by you, but aren't reading HN this morning.


...or are using your work without you or them knowing. E.g., just the other day I added the fst crate as a dependency to do longest prefix searches on a set of word/continuation pieces [1]. Similarly, we use fst in a word lemmatization tool that is used to lemmatize billions of tokens.

Thanks for the awesome crates!

[1] https://github.com/stickeritis/wordpieces/blob/7abbfb893ec20...


I apologize for not knowing the protocol to say "Thank You" on HN without additional contribution. So threading on this message. Hope it ok!

Thank you Burntsushi. You rock my world!


As I've been learning Rust, I've seen ripgrep held up as one of the shining examples of how to use Rust to create useful, effective tools that new rustaceans should look at.


Same. The repo doesn’t disappoint. It’s thorough and very well documented. I am really glad I started reading through the codebase when I did. My only regret is not reading through earlier.




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