Add `Select-String`/`sls` to the benchsuite

[brian6932]

trafficstars

Describe your feature request

Well Select-String/sls doesn't have to pipe binary data to a forked process, and it's much faster than grep, so I was always curious how it compared. Please just don't respawn the pwsh process, as that's very heavy and won't give you accurate results, benches would have to be done in the same shell. https://learn.microsoft.com/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.utility/select-string

[BurntSushi]

Could you rephrase your request for a target audience that doesn't know PowerShell? (For example, me.)

Maybe you could provide real examples of what to do and what not to do.

[brian6932]

1. PowerShell's (7+) crossplatform, so it's not much more than just launching it as the shell and running the benchmarks through it, just make sure to use -NoProfile and -NonInteractive as startup pwsh flags to not import or enable anything by accident. And as mentioned before, launching with something like -Command is heavy and shouldn't be used within the benchmark, the shell kinda JIT compiles itself at startup (I think). Basically don't do:

   pwsh -c 'sls regex'
   

2. Select-String uses case insensitive .net regex, so whatever that supports, you can use in Select-String. Could be cool to also test -SimpleMatch & -CaseSensitive too I guess. It's pretty straight forward, works similarly to egrep/ripgrep.

3. From stdin:

   cat -Raw whatever | sls regex
   

   Get-Content -Raw whatever | Select-String regex
   

4. From all recursive files within the working dir:

   sls regex
   

   Select-String regex
   

Top's using default aliases, bottom's using full commands just for clarity's sake. If you want to run a bin with the same name as the alias on unix OS' (on Windows you'd just append .exe, coreutils' cat would be a good relevant example here), you'd want to use the full path, or delete the alias. You can make sure what you're sending is an alias, function, or bin, with the gcm/Get-Command function, and you can remove the alias with Remove-Alias (-Force), use absolute paths, or use the -CommandType Application flag Get-Command.

[BurntSushi]

Thanks! I'll take a look when I get chance to use my Windows laptop. I'll at least do some ad hoc benchmarking, and depending on the result of that, I may or may not add it to the benchsuite script.

[brian6932]

Sure, just know that PowerShell shipped with Windows' version 5, so there could be some pretty large differences.

[BurntSushi]

Differences between what? Are you suggesting using PowerShell on Unix instead?

(I'd appreciate if you could spell out more of what you mean here.)

[brian6932]

The OS doesn't matter, It's just a matter of PowerShell's version, PowerShell 7+ can be used anywhere. PowerShell shipped on Windows' version 5, years out of date. You can benchmark on anything you like. https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell

❯ powershell -NoProfile -NonInteractive -Command '$PSVersionTable'

Name                           Value
----                           -----
PSVersion                      5.1.19041.4291
PSEdition                      Desktop
PSCompatibleVersions           {1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0...}
BuildVersion                   10.0.19041.4291
CLRVersion                     4.0.30319.42000
WSManStackVersion              3.0
PSRemotingProtocolVersion      2.3
SerializationVersion           1.1.0.1

❯ pwsh -NoProfile -NonInteractive -Command '$PSVersionTable'

Name                           Value
----                           -----
PSVersion                      7.5.0-preview.2
PSEdition                      Core
GitCommitId                    7.5.0-preview.2
OS                             Microsoft Windows 10.0.19044
Platform                       Win32NT
PSCompatibleVersions           {1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0…}
PSRemotingProtocolVersion      2.3
SerializationVersion           1.1.0.1
WSManStackVersion              3.0