> I hope it demonstrates that Go can be a viable alternative to C as a systems programming language.
Are you kidding me? This is nothing close to a systems programming language. This isn't much of a comparison at all. wc is a very simple case that doesn't match the complexity of real-world programs. Go comes close here because you're not using the high-level abstractions and that make it useful in the real world. GNU coreutils also tend to focus on having tons of features (compared to BSD/busybox/plan9/other), which can slow them down. If you really want to get competitive, I bet an AVX-512 implementation would be fastest, and that's more doable in C, but this is a bogus comparison in any case. It's just people doing this because they like a specific language.
Furthermore this isn't "system programming", he just replaced a "user land" program with another. But I blame the Go team for turning "system programming" and "realtime programming" into useless buzzwords to promote their language.
Yeah when I first looked at go that was the first 'no fu' for me. Go isn't a systems or real time programming language. It's a managed language with training wheels. Which is okay by me. Lying about it though is not okay.
The second FU is they claim that decisions they made based on personal preferences were technical ones. That's a very insidious lie that programmers make all the time. Insidious because it destroys trust between programmers and managers.
Are you kidding me? This is nothing close to a systems programming language. This isn't much of a comparison at all. wc is a very simple case that doesn't match the complexity of real-world programs. Go comes close here because you're not using the high-level abstractions and that make it useful in the real world. GNU coreutils also tend to focus on having tons of features (compared to BSD/busybox/plan9/other), which can slow them down. If you really want to get competitive, I bet an AVX-512 implementation would be fastest, and that's more doable in C, but this is a bogus comparison in any case. It's just people doing this because they like a specific language.