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A comment on An overengineered solution to `sort | uniq -c` with 25x throughput (hist). Parent comment

Re:An overengineered solution to `sort | uniq -c` with 25x t... by xorcist on Monday October 27, 2025 @10:10AM (#45721215)
From a causal glance, isn't your code limited by the amount of available memory?

Which could be totally useful in itself, but not even close to what "sort" is doing.

Did you run sort with a buffer size larger than the data? Your specialized one-pass program is likely faster, but at least the numbers would mean something.

That said, I don't see what is over-engineered here. It's pretty straightforward and easy to read.

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Re:An overengineered solution to `sort | uniq -c` with 25x t... by noamteyssier on Tuesday October 28, 2025 @12:47PM (#45735267)
Yes you're right, it's not trying to do what `sort` is doing, it's trying to reproduce the output of `sort | uniq -c | sort -n` which is a more specialized but common task.

But you're right - it will be limited by RAM in a way the unix tools are not.

I did add a test with sort using a larger buffer size to the benchmarks as well.

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