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Top 3 Go awk Projects
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Project mention: Cursor's latest "browser experiment" implied success without evidence | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-01-16
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 creator 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.
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rare
Create terminal-based histograms, bar graphs, tables, heatmaps and more in realtime using regex and expressions. (by zix99)
Project mention: TIL about rare, a CLI aggregation visualization tool | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-01-26 -
Project mention: Cursor's latest "browser experiment" implied success without evidence | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-01-16
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 creator 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.
NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
Go awk discussion
Go awk related posts
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From 0 to 11 Bugs Fixed: How GoAWK Battle-Tested My 3000x Faster Regex Engine
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When is it OK to panic in Go?
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GoAWK, an Awk interpreter written in Go (2018)
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Looking for a script for csv file
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Why does awk parse '1&&x=1' as '1&&(x=1)' not '(1&&x)=1' when '&&' is high precedence than '='?
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Go 1.19 Release Candidate 1 is released
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Simple Lists: a tiny to-do list app written the old-school way (server-side Go, no JS)
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A note from our sponsor - AppSignal
www.appsignal.com | 10 Oct 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source awk projects in Go? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | goawk | 2,060 |
| 2 | rare | 358 |
| 3 | uawk | 9 |
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