Performance comparison: counting words in Python, Go, C++, C, Awk, Forth, Rust

Very interesting, these kinds of articles are (to me) some of the best content we get on here. I'm no expert in any of the languages used except maybe C, at least I'm quick to form opinions about C code. In C, I'm not so sure that there is a well-established "idiomatic" concept, since C is not so tightly bound to a community as more modern languages. At least that's my feeling. That said, I was shocked to see that…

Re: the Rust optimized implementation, I was able to get ~20-25% better performance by rewriting the for loops as iterators, using Rust's byte range pattern matching, and a buffered writer, which seems crazy, but it's true. I chalked it up to some crazy ILP/SIMD tricks the compiler is doing. I even submitted a PR[0], but Ben decided he was tired of maintaining and decided to archive the project (which fair enough!). [0]: https://github.com/benhoyt/countwords/pull/115

I know that this is not a golf match, nevertheless, with the OP "this is what I would write in Python in real life" (eliding the module import) being: counts = collections.Counter() for line in sys.stdin: words = line.lower().split() counts.update(words) for word, count in counts.most_common(): print(word, count) I can't but resist to say what I would write in raku in "real life" (all in standard lib btw)... sub MAIN($in) { say $in.words>>.lc.Bag.sort(-*.value); } This is Unicode safe and (imho) gives…