On: Beating Decades of Optimized C with 80 Lines of Haskell

[olliej]

I just wrote a very dumb implementation of wc and it’s easily twice as fast.

I think the core issue is that wc is not a super optimized program. It is sufficiently fast for most purposes and so hasn’t ever been improved.

[xrisk → olliej]

Can you test it with GNU wc? I'm curious https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/wc.c

[olliej → xrisk]

Here is my super dumb implementation. Doesn't handle multibyte, doesn't handle stdin -- but I don't think the Haskell version did either, so I don't have a problem with that limit.

https://github.com/ojhunt/wc

It's the simplest thing that could obviously work, but its generally not tested beyond the most basic versions.

[olliej → xrisk]

I’m comparing to Mac wc, which is apparently what they were testing against, and I was getting twice that perf without anything clever.

That said I’ll try to post my horrifying impl to GitHub later :)