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Comment by andrix | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering if this is the start of a set of open source lunching from google of its core tools. AFAIK, sawzall without mapreduce is like a car without the engine, but anyway I'm very pleased to read the code and start trying the language. Kudos to Google!

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Google's implementation of MapReduce is so tightly bound to their internal infrastructure (GFS, BigTable, etc.) that opensourcing wouldn't do anybody much good.

Do you mean an engine without a car? It seems like you mean sawzall is only useful for mapreduce.

Sawzall as a language is quite a bit uglier than the vast majority of general purpose languages. Couple this with the read/emit nature of the language, and it's either useful as a stream processing language, or as a step in a mapreduce chain.

Given how easy other languages are at processing streams, tagging output, etc., and that Sawzall doesn't really have an idea of shared state between "records" (aside from data emitted), it's hard to find things that Sawzall is good at other than mapreduce.

Also, the language was purpose-built to be used as a step in mapreduce, and not as a general purpose language.

You can always use it with Yahoo!'s s4 (released yesterday). http://wiki.s4.io/Manual/S4Overview

Or I could use any one of a dozen other languages that are more convenient to use, already available on my system, already works with S4, and with a syntax that doesn't make me want to cry :P

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