But I didn't want to be bogged down by dependencies.. so I didn't want to go nowhere near Python (and pyenv.. and anaconda.. and then probably having to dockerize that for some reason too..) nor nodeJS nor any of that.
Found a bash shell script to parse TAP written by ESR of all people. That sounds fine, I thought. Most everywhere has bash, and there are no other dependencies.
But it was slow. I mean.. painfully, ridiculously slow. Parsing like 400 lines of TAP took almost a minute.
That's when I did some digging and learned about what awk really is. A scripting language that's baked into the POSIX suite. I had heard vaguely about it beforehand, but never realized it had more power than it's sed/ed/cut/etc brethren in the suite.
So I coded up a TAP parser in awk and it went swimmingly, matched the ESR parser's feature set, and ran millions of lines in less than a second. Score! :D