Comment by j1elo
2 years ago
I'm happy that at last, my Stack Overflow question and answer have been fully solved with technology improvements!
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43891605/search-partial-...
It's been almost 6 years, though... for a search scenario that would be trivial to implement with grep (at scale that's another thing...) Still, a nice example of perfect being the enemy of good, I guess.
Thanks for your patience! It has been a long road with some dead ends (we've wanted to add this since 2012 at least). We actually wrote about why we didn't just use grep in our last blog post: https://github.blog/2023-02-06-the-technology-behind-githubs...
I really enjoyed that blog post. Especially the comparisons that lay out how feasible it can actually be to do the stupid, simple thing of "grep the whole data set every time" up to a surprising point.