frawk

Note (2024, ezrosent@) While the policy on bugs and feature requests remains unchanged I've had much less time over the last 1-2 years to devote to bug fixes and feature requests for frawk. Other awks are more actively maintained, and CSV support is now a much more common feature in awk compared to when this project started; I'll update this notice if frawk's status changes.

frawk is a small programming language for writing short programs processing textual data. To a first approximation, it is an implementation of the AWK language; many common Awk programs produce equivalent output when passed to frawk. You might be interested in frawk if you want your scripts to handle escaped CSV/TSV like standard Awk fields, or if you want your scripts to execute faster.

The info subdirectory has more in-depth information on frawk:

• Overview: what frawk is all about, how it differs from Awk.
• Types: A quick gloss on frawk's approach to types and type inference.
• Parallelism: An overview of frawk's parallelism support.
• Benchmarks: A sense of the relative performance of frawk and other tools when processing large CSV or TSV files.
• Builtin Functions Reference: A list of builtin functions implemented by frawk, including some that are new when compared with Awk.

frawk is dual-licensed under MIT or Apache 2.0.

Installation

Note: frawk uses some nightly-only Rust features by default. Build without the unstable feature to build on stable.

You will need to install Rust. If you have not updated rust in a while, run rustup update nightly (or rustup update if building using stable). If you would like to use the LLVM backend, you will need an installation of LLVM 17-22 on your machine:

• See this site for installation instructions on some debian-based Linux distros. See also the comments on this issue for docker files that can be used to build a binary on Ubuntu.
• On Arch pacman -Sy llvm llvm-libs and a C compiler (e.g. clang) are sufficient.
• brew install llvm@18 or similar seem to work on Mac OS.

Depending on where your package manager puts these libraries, you may need to point LLVM_SYS_180_PREFIX at the llvm library installation (e.g. /usr/lib/llvm-18 on Linux or /usr/local/opt/llvm@18 on Mac OS when installing llvm@18 via Homebrew).

Building Without LLVM

While the LLVM backend is recommended, it is possible to build frawk only with support for the Cranelift-based JIT and its bytecode interpreter. To do this, build without the llvm<llvm_version> feature. The Cranelift backend provides comparable performance to LLVM for smaller scripts, but LLVM's optimizations can sometimes deliver a substantial performance boost over Cranelift (see the benchmarks document for some examples of this).

Building Using Stable

frawk currently requires a nightly compiler by default. To compile frawk using stable, compile without the unstable feature. Using rustup default nightly, or some other method to run a nightly compiler release is otherwise required to build frawk.

Building a Binary

With those prerequisites, cloning this repository and a cargo build --release or cargo [+nightly] install --path <frawk repo path> will produce a binary that you can add to your PATH if you so choose:

$ cd <frawk repo path>
# With recommended defaults for Linux, Mac OS or Windows: use_mimalloc,allow_avx2,unstable
$ cargo +nightly install --path .
$ cargo +nightly install --path . --no-default-features --features use_mimalloc,allow_avx2,unstable

# With jemalloc instead of mimalloc as memory allocator (Linux, Mac OS):
$ cargo +nightly install --path . --no-default-features --features use_jemalloc,allow_avx2,unstable

# With recommended defaults and LLVM backend (Linux and Mac OS):
# Choose LLVM version feature that matches your installed LLVM version:
#   "llvm17", "llvm18", "llvm19", "llvm20", "llvm21" or "llvm22"
$ cargo +nightly install --path . --no-default-features --features use_mimalloc,allow_avx2,unstable,llvm18

# Cross compile frawk for Windows with recommended features.
$ cargo +nightly install --path . --target x86_64-pc-windows-gnu --no-default-features --features use_mimalloc,allow_avx2,unstable

frawk is now on crates.io, so running cargo +nightly install frawk with the desired features should also work.

Bugs and Feature Requests

frawk has bugs, and many rough edges. If you notice a bug in frawk, filing an issue with an explanation of how to reproduce the error would be very helpful. There are no guarantees on response time or latency for a fix. No one works on frawk full-time. The same policy holds for feature requests.