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Performance comparison: counting words in Python, Go, C++, C, Awk, Forth, Rust
Summary: I describe a simple interview problem (counting frequencies of unique words), solve it in various languages, and compare performance across them. For each language, I’ve included a simple, idiomatic solution as well as a more optimized approach via profiling…
Language Simple Optimized Notes grep0.04 0.04 grepbaseline; optimized setsLC_ALL=Cwc -w0.29 0.20 wcbaseline; optimized setsLC_ALL=CZig 0.54 by ifreund and matu3ba Nim 0.76 0.58 by csterritt and euantorano C 0.97 0.23 Go 1.14 0.39 Crystal 1.29 by Andrea Manzini PHP 1.36 by Max Semenik Rust 1.43 0.38 by Andrew Gallant C# 1.51 0.82 by J Taylor, Y Ostapenko, O Turan OCaml 1.72 by Nate Dobbins and Pavlo Khrystenko C++ 1.73 0.42 optimized by Jussi Pakkanen Perl 1.81 by Charles Randall F# 1.82 1.59 by Yuriy Ostapenko Kotlin 1.86 by Kazik Pogoda Python 2.07 1.30 Lua 2.50 1.97 by themadsens; runs under luajit JavaScript 2.52 1.90 by Dani Biro and Flo Hinze Ruby 3.13 2.43 by Bill Mill AWK 3.55 1.13 optimized uses mawkD 4.16 1.01 by Ross Lonstein Swift 4.23 by Daniel Muellenborn Forth 4.26 1.46 Shell 14.60 1.85 optimized does LC_ALL=C sort -S 2G
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dimitarvp
Yeah, right, as if. They just use bridges to C libraries underneath.
It’s tempting to think your favourite language is fast. But very often it’s just the stdlib shelling out to native implementations. Erlang does it too.
2
Exadra37
Thanks for the post 
It’s missing Elixir… just saying 
1
dimitarvp
PHP faster than Rust and C++?!
Nice joke. 

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