Performance comparison: counting words in Python, Go, C++, C, Awk, Forth, Rust

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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
grep 0.04 0.04 grep baseline; optimized sets LC_ALL=C
wc -w 0.29 0.20 wc baseline; optimized sets LC_ALL=C
Zig 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 mawk
D 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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Thanks for the post :slight_smile:

It’s missing Elixir… just saying :grin:

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PHP faster than Rust and C++?!

Nice joke. :flushed::grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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I like the Crystal syntax considering its speed :heart_eyes:

counts = Hash(String, Int32).new(0)

STDIN.each_line do |line|
  line.downcase.split.each do |word|
    counts[word] += 1
  end
end

entries = counts.to_a.sort_by! &.[1]
entries.reverse_each do |(word, count)|
  puts "#{word} #{count}"
end
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PHP is not the joke it used to be :sweat_smile:

Ruby is faster than Swift? :exploding_head:

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Ruby has come a long way too… just like PHP :smiley:

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Now a days almost every language is fast enough. Often you have to choose a language for a job on other criteria than performance.

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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.

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