[lilyball]

The obvious reason here is jaq makes some changes to semantics, changes which would be rejected by jq.

Another likely reason is that it seems a motivation for jaq is improving the performance of jq. Any low-hanging fruit there in the jq implementation was likely handled a long time ago, so improving this in jq is likely to be hard. Writing a brand new implementation allows for trying out different ways of implementing the same functionality, and using a different language known for its performance helps too.

Using a language like Rust also helps with the goal of ensuring correctness and safety.

[cryptonector]

jq hasn't had much work done to make it fast though.

There's two classes of performance problems:

- implementation issues

- language issues

The latter is mainly a problem in `foreach` and also some missing ways to help programmers release references (via `$bindings`) that they no longer need.

The former is mostly a matter of doing a variety of bytecode interpreter improvements, and maybe doing more inlining, and maybe finding creative ways to reduce the number of branches.