Benchmarks

The search-time tables below come from the 18 and 19 October 2026 measurement of the 0.1.0 release candidate, Ripscope revision 2fdce59. The Linux kernel selection comes first, followed by Redis and zlib. Both repetitions and both platforms are shown separately, and every time and comparison note comes from that measurement.

On Linux, with the kernel selection, symbol, definition and caller lookups take about a tenth of a millisecond, hundreds of times faster than plain cscope. Even against cscope -q, Ripscope runs text searches about 6× faster, egrep 10× and assignment searches over 70×. A win needs a clear timing difference and an equivalent or source-confirmed better answer.

After a normal startup a Ripscope Session watches its sources and refreshes on its own. On Linux that costs nothing measurable per search. On Windows each search first checks a marker file, about 0.3 to 0.5 ms, which lets cscope -q answer the three lookups of a name nobody defines faster there.

Search times

Times are milliseconds. First means a query’s first pass after Session startup, after any preceding queries. Later means a subsequent pass within that Session. Search times exclude Session startup. “Normal startup” includes each tool’s own freshness checks before the Session becomes ready. “Updates skipped” opens existing indexes without those checks.

Without JavaScript, expand the labelled tables to choose a comparison. Green marks a Ripscope win, red a cscope win, and yellow uncertain timing or a timing/quality tradeoff. Every cell also states its conclusion in words. Follow an answer-quality link for the source-backed explanation.