The instructions can be found here: https://github.com/dflemstr/rq/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md.
So you'll need to fetch a V8 build and set two environment variables pointing to them but then it's just a regular cargo build.
In Record Query – A tool for doing record analysis and transformationdflemstr
rq
Rust2016–2022
dflemstr / rq
rq
Record Query - A tool for doing record analysis and transformation
20Distinct people
25Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.3KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Record Query - A tool for doing record analysis and transformation
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- antonmedv/fx · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- borkdude/jet · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- cube2222/jql · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 10:56:20 AM 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 year25 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-08-31 17:16:08 UTC to 2022-11-03 08:48:10 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 2 | 4 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 1 | 7 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
rq
NOTE: rq is in very low maintenance mode as my day job is taking up
a lot of my time. I will try my best to merge pull requests but will
not drive active development of this crate.
NOTE: rq no longer ships with query support and a Javascript
engine is not included; instead, it focuses exclusively on format
transformation. You can still pipe into a runtime like node.js if
you need Javascript evaluation. Please see this issue
to discuss introducing a new query language.
This is the home of the tool called rq (record query). It's a tool
that's used for performing queries on streams of records in various
formats.
The goal is to make ad-hoc exploration of data sets easy without
having to use more heavy-weight tools like SQL/MapReduce/custom
programs. rq fills a similar niche as tools like awk or sed,
but works with structured (record) data instead of text.
It was created with love out of the best parts of Rust, and is
distributed as a dependency-free binary on many operating systems and
architectures.
Quick links
Installation — How to install rq.
Tutorial — Learn rq from scratch.
Protobuf — Configure Protobuf specifics.
Development — Contribute to rq.
Format support status
Format
Read
Write
Apache Avro
✔️
✔️
CBOR
✔️
✔️
JSON
✔️
✔️
MessagePack
✔️
✔️
Google Protocol Buffers
✔️
✖️
YAML
✔️
✔️
TOML
✔️
✔️
Raw (plain text)
✔️
✔️
CSV
✔️
✔️
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
6 sourcesThere is some awesome reusable bits here for embedding V8 in a rust application.[0]
I wish the build process was documented somewhere instead of just distributing binaries but it isn't shocking that it is probably a pretty complicated environment to setup.
https://github.com/dflemstr/rq/blob/master/src/query/context...
In Record Query – A tool for doing record analysis and transformationRecord Query – A tool for doing record analysis and transformation
83 points · Open discussionAw dang, I wish I knew about this earlier. May have made teaching command-line data processing to beginners quite a bit easier. Example lesson using Spotify API (which is still public and free):
http://www.compciv.org/recipes/data/touring-the-spotify-api/
(just noticed that you used the Spotify API too for the demo :) https://github.com/dflemstr/rq/blob/master/doc/demo.md)
I personally like using jq but not sure how easy-to-grok it is for people who are new to both the command-line and to serialized data structures in general. Will have give rq a spin (waiting for it to compile on my machine) but it looks quite nice, at least for my own uses, which heavily involve YAML.
In terms of TSV/CSV support, you may want to checkout csvjson, which is part of the csvkit command-line suite: http://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/0.9.1/scripts/csvjson.html
c
Read the rest
svkit is my go-to tool for data, so much that I rarely ever use SQL for anything other than when I actually need a database. I suppose if rq were to be my go-to data-processing tool, I'd probably do this:
csvjson mydata.csv | rq ...
Unless I'm missing it in the documents, there doesn't appear to be a way to convert to CSV? That would be helpful. FWIW, csvkit has a tool named in2csv, which will read from line-delimited JSON:
curl -s 'https://api.spotify.com/v1/search?q=rihanna&type=track&limit=50' \
| rq 'at "tracks.items" | spread | flatMap artists' \
| in2csv -f ndjson
http://csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/stable/scripts/in2csv.html
An alternative that completely replaced jq for me: rq https://github.com/dflemstr/rq
Not limited to JSON, and super fast.
In Jq – Work with JSON on the command lineRecord Query – A tool for doing record analysis and transformation
1 points · Open discussion