benhoyt

goawk

Go2018–2026

benhoyt / goawk

goawk

A POSIX-compliant AWK interpreter written in Go, with CSV support

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REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

A POSIX-compliant AWK interpreter written in Go, with CSV support

GitHub

Where it is used

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What people are saying

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year22 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-08-18 02:30:16 UTC to 2026-01-16 21:35:44 UTC.

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1	0
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	0	3
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	7	0	7
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	7	0	7
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2026 (partial)	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1

What Hacker News says

22 sources

benhoyt·Jan 16, 2026

Not me personally, but a GitHub user wrote a replacement for Go's regexp library that was "up to 3-3000x+ faster than stdlib": https://github.com/coregx/coregex ... at first I was impressed, so started testing it and reporting bugs, but as soon as I ran my own benchmarks, it all fell apart (https://github.com/coregx/coregex/issues/29). After some mostly-bot updates, that issue was closed. But someone else opened a very similar one recently (https://github.com/coregx/coregex/issues/79) -- same deal, "actually, it's slower than the stdlib in my tests". Basically AI slop with poor tests, poor benchmarks, and way oversold. How he's positioning these projects is the problematic bit, I reckon, not the use of AI. Same user did a similar thing by creating an AWK interpreter written in Go using LLMs: https://github.com/kolkov/uawk -- as the creato

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r of (I think?) the only AWK interpreter written in Go (https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk), I was curious. It turns out that if there's only one item in the training data (GoAWK), AI likes to copy and paste freely from the original. But again, it's poorly tested and poorly benchmarked. I just don't see how one can get quality like this, without being realistic about code review, testing, and benchmarking.

In Cursor's latest “browser experiment” implied success without evidence

commandersaki·Apr 2, 2025

GoAWK uses panic & recover to simplify error handling in the recursive descent parser: https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk/blob/master/parser/parser.g...

In When is it OK to panic in Go?

__s·Apr 14, 2024

Surprised recent versions 1.18+ didn't see a jump in improvement, but might explain sumloop improvement for 1.19 I checked, they use switch on opcodes in vm.go. So would expect a recent improvement, but probably only <5%, & I didn't look close enough to see if awk is one of those languages where instruction dispatch matters less (like how APL tends to avoid issues since array ops avoid having dispatch in tight loops, or how Python avoids instruction dispatch overhead when using numpy) Indeed, they have a comment saying array of functions is faster for older versions of go: https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk/blob/158232a76856e12d680a53... For VMs Go had a problem for large switch statements: it would always use binary search instead of a jump table. This caused gopher-lua & go-lua to both take the route of having an array of functions which

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they call on to dispatch instead A couple years ago this was fixed: https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/357330 I measured a small perf improvement switching gopher-lua to switch: https://github.com/yuin/gopher-lua/pull/479 edit: looking closer, not sure `compiler.CallBuiltin` is doing them a favor anymore. They seem to have a lot of double dispatch operations (like `compiler.AugAssignField`) which would be less impactful with binary search switch

In Go performance from version 1.0 to 1.22

ryenus·Jun 30, 2023

Thanks! ICYMI: GoAWK [1] - A POSIX-compliant AWK interpreter written in Go, with CSV support. [1]: https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk

In The Awk Programming Language, Second Edition

benhoyt·Jun 28, 2023

No, unfortunately the Gawk/awk --csv option doesn't support writing back to CSV. FWIW, GoAWK supports CSV input mode with "-i csv" and CSV output mode with "-o csv" for this purpose, as well as special syntax for fetching a @"named-field" rather than a $numbered_field. Docs: https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk/blob/master/docs/csv.md

In Using command line to process CSV files (2022)

networked·Mar 30, 2023

I recently wrote a program of slightly over 200 lines in portable AWK: https://gitlab.com/dbohdan/humsize. I wrote it for a specific operating system (NetBSD), but I have ended up using it everywhere; the portability helped with it. I can recommend AWK for small utilities that transform text in a line- and column-oriented manner and don't need libraries. The main difficulties were making the command-line interface and testing. You can't have flags that begin with a dash in portable AWK without a shell wrapper, and I didn't want one. I settled on manually parsing key=value options, which I don't think are bad, just nonstandard. They look like this: humsize format=%6.1f%1s 'zero= empty' There is no standard way to test AWK code. For testing I wrote a shell script that checks the program's outputs with grep: https://gitlab.com/dbohdan/hu

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msize/-/blob/122aaed8d65dc8c285.... Don't do this; your tests should give the user (you) better feedback. You may think your program doesn't need anything but a couple of trivial tests that won't ever change; it is a pain when you inevitably are proven wrong. I should have instead had a directory with reference outputs and diffed against them to see what went wrong (my own example: https://github.com/dbohdan/initool/blob/72f65d3fde245ff8660c...). To ensure I didn't introduce portability issues, I set up testing against different awks in GitLab CI. image: debian:bullseye-slim before_script: - apt update - apt install -y busybox gawk mawk original-awk - ln -s "$(which busybox)" awk - busybox wget -O goawk.tar.gz https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk/releases/download/v1.21.0/goawk_v1.21.0_linux_amd… - tar xzvf goawk.tar.gz test: script: - AWK=false ./test || true - AWK=./awk ./test - AWK=gawk ./test - AWK=./goawk ./test - AWK=mawk ./test - AWK=original-awk ./test Edit: Rephrased and added a nicer shell test example.

In Awk Technical Notes

horseRad·Mar 16, 2023

You should include qsv (https://github.com/jqnatividad/qsv) and goawk (https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk) into the CSV section! Goawk got a csv/tsv mode and qsv is loaded with features being developed.

In Miller: Like Awk, sed, cut, join, and sort for CSV, TSV, and tabular JSON

jefftk·Mar 16, 2023

There's also GoAWK, which supports CSV natively ("-i csv"): https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk

In Miller: Like Awk, sed, cut, join, and sort for CSV, TSV, and tabular JSON

nequo·Jan 20, 2023

GoAWK's CSV mode is a great addition to AWK. Have you thought about adding a JSON mode, too, to get an AWK-flavored alternative to jq? Edit: I see that you have: https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk/issues/152

In A first person shooter in 571 lines of GNU Awk (2016)

benhoyt·Jan 19, 2023

I don't know of a "libawk" C library, but my GoAWK interpreter can also be used as a library (Go) library. See reference docs: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/benhoyt/goawk/interp A project that's using it that way is Benthos, a "stream processor" written in Go. Awk is one of the "processors", the components that filter and transform data: https://www.benthos.dev/docs/components/processors/awk

In A first person shooter in 571 lines of GNU Awk (2016)

benhoyt·Aug 21, 2022

Yes, that's right. With my simplistic UTF-8-based implementation it turned length() -- for example -- from O(1) to O(N), turning O(N) algorithms which use length() into O(N^2). See this issue: https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk/issues/93 Similar with substr() and other string functions, which when operating as bytes are O(1), but become O(N) when trying to count the number of codepoints as UTF-8. GNU Gawk has a fancier approach, which stores strings as UTF-8 as long as it can, but converts to UTF-32 if it needs to (eg: the string is non-ASCII and you call substr). It looks like Brian Kernighan's code has the same issue with length() and substr(). I'm going to try to email him about this, as I think it's kind of a performance blocker.

In Brian Kernighan adds Unicode support to Awk

xonix·Aug 20, 2022

This sounds reasonable. When the GoAWK creator tried to add Unicode support through UTF-8 he discovered that this had drastic performance implications (rendering some algorithms to be O(N^2) instead of O(N)), if done naive https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk/issues/35. Therefore the change was reverted till the more efficient implementation can be found.

In Brian Kernighan adds Unicode support to Awk

e4m2·Jul 24, 2022

The author maintains an AWK implementation: https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk

In Performance comparison: counting words in Python, C/C++, Awk, Rust, and more

benhoyt·Jul 18, 2022

I'm not sure if it was via my personal website or just my GitHub profile, but I got my current job at Canonical due to the CTO there reaching out about my GoAWK project (https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk). I get regular recruitment emails because I have my CV/resume online: most of them are very low-effort, but 1 in 20 or something are interesting emails where the recruiter has actually looked at my website and will tailor it personally. I also just enjoy technical writing, and get joy out of sharing it on HN. So it's "worth it" for me.

In Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

benhoyt·May 13, 2022

I've now updated the benchmarks to avoid huge.csv: the write benchmarks now write a big 1GB, 20-column CSV and the read benchmarks use that same CSV: https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk/commit/07eb4505a7f64cffceeb...

In Modernizing AWK, a 45-year old language, by adding CSV support

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