JOJoker_vD·Jun 20, 2024
SIMD-based reimplementations of wc already exist, e.g. this [0] one, and it's rather straightforward.
[0] https://github.com/expr-fi/fastlwc
In Wc2: Investigates optimizing 'wc', the Unix word count programexpr-fi
fastlwc
C2019–2024
expr-fi / fastlwc
fastlwc
SIMD-enhanced word counter
9Distinct people
9Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
257GitHub stars
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What it is
SIMD-enhanced word counter
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
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HN mentions by year9 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-10-28 04:05:12 UTC to 2024-06-20 16:14:30 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 2 | 3 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
9 sources>I was initially using wc but that got too slow so I wrote something that was like wc but only did line counting.
Any reasonable wc should be fast enough for that purpose; just remember to use the '-l' switch to activate the fast path for line counting.
>Some things I noted when doing my testing is that each program counted the number of lines, characters, and words differently in this corpus.
All programs should report the same line counts (should be exactly the number of line feed characters in the input).
Other than that, it really depends on your current locale and the wc you're using (see https://github.com/expr-fi/fastlwc README for more details). Do note that this D implementation seems to implement the wc character counting behaviour you get with the '-m' switch (instead of the byte counting default).
Also worth noting that diffe
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rent operating systems have different locale definitions; glibc locales explicitly treat non-breaking spaces as non-whitespace characters, while for example Windows doesn't.
Hey, author here. You are absolutely right - Go would have a hard time outperforming finely tuned C. Rather, the article was more focused on exploring concurrency mechanisms in Go. The (admittedly clickbait) title was more of a reference to the articles before it than anything else.
That said, I think you'll find this SIMD-enhanced wc interesting:
https://github.com/expr-fi/fastlwc/
In Beating C with 70 lines of GoIt's mentioned in the post https://github.com/expr-fi/fastlwc/
In Beating C with 70 lines of Gohere you go: https://github.com/expr-fi/fastlwc
"Beating wc with C"
In Beating C with Common LispBeating wc with less portable C
4 points · Open discussion