Strawk
I implemented Rob Pike's forgotten Awk
Details
- External ID
- 45966006
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- —
- Website domain
- —
- Launched
- Nov. 18, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.0982532751091703
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Rob Pike wrote a paper, Structural Regular Expressions (https://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/structural_regexps/se.pdf), that criticized the Unix toolset for being excessively line oriented. Tools like awk and grep assume a regular record structure usually denoted by newlines. Unix pipes just stream the file from one command to another, and imposing the newline structure limits the power of the Unix shell.In the paper, Mr. Pike proposed an awk of the future that used structural regular expressions to parse input instead of line by line processing. As far as I know, it was never implemented. So I implemented it. I attempted to imitate AWK and it's standard library as much as possible, but some things are different because I used Golang under the hood.Live Demo: https://ahalbert.github.io/strawk/demo/strawk.htmlGithub: https://github.com/ahalbert/strawk
Enrichment
- Theme
- database infrastructure and developer tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- awk implementation
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Writing a custom language interpreter for structural regular expressions requires implementing non-trivial parsing and Rob Pike's non-standard regex execution model.
What it would actually take: The project requires writing an interpreter or compiler based on Pike's 'Structural Regular Expressions' paper, involving a custom recursive descent or PEG parser for Awk-like grammar and an engine implementing structural regex primitives (submatching, structural iteration, disjoint edits). While LLMs can generate boilerplate lexers and parsers, getting the non-line-oriented buffer navigation and state transitions formally correct requires deep compilers and automata knowledge.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 14 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #15 of 15 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 1 day after the earliest competitor.
- Shuck · hn · 2026-04-30 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Grsh · hn · 2026-01-14 · 50 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Structural code grep across public GitHub repositories · hn · 2026-08-22 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- ShellTalk brings deterministic text-to-bash · hn · 2026-04-22 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.33
- Seapie · hn · 2026-01-12 · 22 upvotes · similarity 0.33
- Shifu · hn · 2026-03-30 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.33
- MCP file tools silently eat your context window.I built one that doesnt · hn · 2026-03-01 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.32
- GNU grep as a PHP extension · hn · 2026-04-10 · 32 upvotes · similarity 0.32
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
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