wc

A slightly significantly worse implementation of GNU wc in go.

Performance comparison

All the files mentioned below are present in the tests/ directory

GNU wc

file	size	time to execute	CPU usage	user CPU time	system CPU time
bee-movie.txt	88k	0.002s	76%	0.00s	0.00s
test.txt	336k	0.003s	90%	0.00s	0.00s
1mboftxt	1.0M	0.005s	95%	0.01s	0.00s
les-miserables.txt	3.3M	0.020s	97%	0.02s	0.00s

gwc (mine)

file	size	time to execute	CPU usage	user CPU time	system CPU time
bee-movie.txt	88k	0.004s	120%	0.01s	0.00s
test.txt	336k	0.009s	111%	0.01s	0.00s
1mboftxt	1.0M	0.015s	108%	0.02s	0.00s
les-miserables.txt	3.3M	0.051s	99%	0.04s	0.01s

Conclusion

On average , my program is 163 times slower and consumes 26% more CPU to provide performance that is worse than the wc tool that ships with most GNU/linux.

Strengths

• identical results when compared with GNU wc over the test data.
• -v flag to understand what the hell is actually being printed

Limitations

• cannot read from stdin if no file is passed so cat somefile.txt | gwc -l won't work.
• messy codebase
• no automated testing
• slower

Images

TODO (maybe/eventually/will never get to it)

• rewrite using simpler techniques.
• use charmcli tools and have nice coloured output
• read from stdin if no file is provided