wc

Well-known wc utility written in Go. Simplified version.

Installation

GOFLAGS='-ldflags=-s -trimpath' go get github.com/avegner/wc

Usage

Usage: wc FILE...
Print newline, word, byte and character counts for each FILE, and a total line if
more than one FILE is specified. A word is a non-zero-length sequence of
characters delimited by white space. Unicode BOM isn't considered a character.
Only ASCII and UTF-8 encodings are supported. Invalid characters are ignored.

Benchmarking

• install time utility:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y time

• run original wc:

$(which time) -v wc -mclw <file>...

• run go wc:

$(which time) -v $(go env GOPATH)/bin/wc <file>...

• compare mem and cpu usage stats

UPX for Go bins

Static Go binaries are significantly larger than C ones. Use UPX to reduce binary size:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y upx
upx -9 -o $(go env GOPATH)/bin/wc.upx $(go env GOPATH)/bin/wc

Output Format

<lines> <words> <chars> <bytes> <file-path>
...

Stats

Wall clock

Test	wc -mclw	Go wc	Go wc.upx
1 x 320.4 MiB UTF-8 file	2.14 s	3.69 s	3.77 s
10 x 320.4 MiB UTF-8 files	21.51 s	20.59 s	20.65 s

Maximum RSS

Test	wc -mclw	Go wc	Go wc.upx
1 x 320.4 MiB UTF-8 file	2220 KiB	2132 KiB	2168 KiB
10 x 320.4 MiB UTF-8 files	2228 KiB	2384 KiB	2424 KiB