ONontouchstart·Sep 13, 2022
BWK’s commit and test files (mentioned in the video)
https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk/commit/d3a19e6f2533d479841...
In Coffee with Brian Kernighan [video]onetrueawk
awk
C2014–2025
onetrueawk / awk
awk
One true awk
17Distinct people
19Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.2KGitHub stars
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What it is
One true awk
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:45:45 PM UTC.
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HN mentions by year19 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2014-01-03 12:37:46 UTC to 2025-03-26 18:30:46 UTC.
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| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 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 | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 1 | 6 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
7 sourcesMentioned in the video
https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk/tree/unicode-support
In Coffee with Brian Kernighan [video]I'm not kidding. Just look at the code:
https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk/commit/d322b2b5fc16484affb...
I am talking about that environment. You are not.
In Brian Kernighan adds Unicode support to AwkIt needs the length for operations such as substring, or to apply length modifiers on regular expressions (such as \w{3,5}), which is a common thing in awk programs.
In fact, the return value of the u8_rune as implemented in the branch we are discussing (https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk/compare/unicode-support) returns a length to be used as an offset later.
This is not me saying, it's the author. There is a code comment there:
> For most of Awk, utf-8 strings just "work", since they look like null-terminated sequences of 8-bit bytes. Functions like length(), index(), and substr() have to operate in units of utf-8 characters. The u8_* functions in run.c handle this.
I know there might be different ways of doing it, but we're talking about a specific implementation.
I was wrong to assume he is storing stuff in UTF-32. He could have, but
Read the rest
there was already code in place there to make the UTF-8 storage easier to implement.
Looks like its not really done yet:
https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk/compare/master...unicode-s...
In Brian Kernighan adds Unicode support to AwkBrian Kernighan adds Unicode support to Awk
618 points · Open discussion>There's tons of incompatible dialects. I think that shows the problem with what you're saying.
To my knowledge the major dialects in use are:
- One True Awk (aka bwk) (https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk) - this one is bundled in all *BSD/macOS
- Gawk (https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/) - this one is bundled in most Linux
- mawk (https://invisible-island.net/mawk/) - bundled in some Linux distros (?), known as the fastest byte-code compiled implementation.
All three have very good compatibility, but Gawk is super-set over POSIX standard. I have some evidence here, since I regularly test [1] against these implementations and even some others, like GoAWK.
[1] https://github.com/xonixx/makesure/actions/runs/1830978431
In Frawk: A fast, JITted, statically-typed AWK written in Rust