Thank you for your thoughts.

I made this as a joke with AI in about two hours because I kept seeing this pattern where code bases were grepping for classes because it was faster than anything else available to PHP userspace.

This is a runtime extension so it doesn't preclude you from using it as it would not be considered part of your proprietary code. Similar to how running grep through shell_exec is not the same as incorporating GPL code in your code. I suppose that is a matter of philosophical and legal opinion but I believe my interpretation is the de facto reality.

As for benchmarks there is a thing in the docs folder talking about that. I spend some time on it. The tldr is the PHP runtime is slower to startup so the overall slowness for PHP was 20% slower compared to the grep CLI but that's an apples to oranges comparison because if you already have a php thread running doing an extra ggrep call in userspace is going to be faster then grep because the binary doesn't need time to load into memory.

I just wanted to throw this code out there in case it's useful to anyone but I was considering write a new one for ripgrep or ag because they are both faster than GNU/Grep.