[Zhyl]

Absolutely, and I think this raises the question of "in what sense are these 'replacements' for existing software?".

If we see them as "immediate drop-in replacements" then the value of them must be that they're identical in every way and the value in them would be in the reduced maintenance overhead for the developers, with maybe a small performance boost if we're lucky. This would be fine, but it's not something that we'd notice if our distro went from using C `grep` to using a Rust rewrite of `grep`. We certainly wouldn't need a list telling us what replacements are available.

However, if we see these as spiritual successors, ones that perform the same function but aren't intended to be aliased to be precisely the same thing, then it makes a lot more sense. We're not looking for backwards compatibility, portability or identical feature sets. We're instead being offered a smorgasbord of options on what ideas we want to embrace and which ones we would want to leave behind.

If ripgrep is better in all use cases than grep, then eventually ripgrep will be the one being used in the scripts organically. We shouldn't be dismissing ripgrep out of hand just because a colleague won't have it on their system. Or, at the very least, we should be noting the good points while also noting that we won't be using the tools ourselves for portability reasons.

[scns]

Let a thousand flowers bloom https://gigamonkeys.com/flowers/