Back in 2021-22, I wrote a series of blog posts about a program called “topfew” (tf from your shell command-line). It finds the field valu

ongoing by Tim Bray · Topfew Release 0.5

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2024-04-16 05:00:06

Back in 2021-22, I wrote a series of blog posts about a program called “topfew” (tf from your shell command-line). It finds the field values (or combinations of values) which appear most often in a stream of records. I built it to explore large-scale data crunching in Go, and to investigate how performance compared to Rust. There was plentiful input, both ideas and code, from Dirkjan Ochtman and Simon Fell. Anyhow, I thought I was finished with it but then I noticed I was using the tf command more days than not, and I have pretty mainstream command-line needs. Plus I got a couple of random pings about whether it was still live. So I cleaned it up a bit and on April 12th, did its first actual release, 0.5.0. Here it is.

Plan · I think it’s stable, and fast enough (see below). Unless someone finds gross breakage or painfully-obvious improvements, I’m going to release 1.0 in a week or so. At some point, I’ll look into Homebrew recipes and suchlike, if I get the feeling they might be used.