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I built a native C# Grep engine that's holding it's own with ripgrep (with zero allocations)

7.3 relevance
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High-performance C# grep, relevant to systems engineering and dev tools.

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I built a native C# Grep engine that's holding it's own with ripgrep (with zero allocations)
Summary

A developer built Glacier.Grep, a native C# grep engine on .NET 10 that beats ripgrep on case-sensitive queries (120.4 ms vs 134.9 ms) over 590 files (257 MB). It achieves zero-allocation via stack-based filesystem traversal with ref struct, hybrid I/O using ArrayPool for small files and MemoryMappedFile for large, and SIMD-accelerated byte search via SearchValues<byte> to eliminate GC pressure. This design targets sub-20ms AI context layers where external CLI processes destroy performance.

Author

Ian Cowley

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