The version you are comparing against is ancient and assumes a low-memory footprint. It only uses something like 10KB of data. It also has a ton more features -- like command line parsing, the ability to read from a file on the command line or stdin, and locale-specific recognition of whitespace.

It's really not solving the same problem.

Argument parsing is hardly the bottleneck when you're scanning 1 GB of data. The reason I didn't implement the rest of the features was to keep the implementation light and readable, and I don't think a fully compliant wc implemented in Go with these patterns would be significantly slower.

As for having a low-memory footprint, 2 of the 4 implementations I mentioned (one single core, one multi-core) consume less memory than wc, and still run much faster.

How much memory does your program uses VS the C program? Did you profile that?

Yes, it's the last column in all the result tables.

FTA: ”Our parallelized implementation runs at more than 3.5x the speed of wc, while matching its memory consumption”