[gravypod]

Needing to tie into a specific API (like codesearch) couples you to the specific storage backend (Github). If you build your software to operate on a POSIX-y file system, you can support anything that shows up as a file system. For example: A local working tree of files, an NFS share, or now a remote git repository.

[westurner]

Running the code where the data already is saves network transfer: with data locality, you don't need to download each file before grepping.

Locality_of_reference#Matrix_multiplication explains how the cache miss penalty applies to optimizing e.g. matrix multiplication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality_of_reference#Matrix_m...