Thank you! For those that don't know, 15 years ago GNU awk was sometimes oddly REALLY slow. Mike's awk was not. Plus when things were overall slower back then, it mattered more.
But there were bugs in mawk and it seemed basically unmaintained. So you'd run into something and have to use gawk or perl instead.
That's no longer the case, the xterm guy adopted it, ten years ago, and now I know!
Last release was late 2017, but it has been very stable for me. Plus the author responds to bug reports.
Mawk is my go-to version because of speed. GNU Awk when its extensions are needed, or the task is over "small data" and the system default version is sufficient.
But there were bugs in mawk and it seemed basically unmaintained. So you'd run into something and have to use gawk or perl instead.
That's no longer the case, the xterm guy adopted it, ten years ago, and now I know!