[ajeetdsouza]

Author here. I have addressed this in the article. The bufio-based implementation was the first one, and it was actually slower.

In the second section, I was able to surpass the performance of the C implementation - by using a read call with a buffer. As I mentioned in the article, the C implementation does the same, and in the interest of a fair benchmark, I set equal buffer sizes for both.

[esmi]

I don't know Go so I am not sure what file.Read does exactly but wc, on my system which uses the same wc.c as Jenner's article, is doing blocking reads in a naive way which I argue makes it somewhat of a paper target.

Maybe the Linux wc version you have is better. I don't know. They do exist and Penner's article gave a link to one. I am not sure as you didn't link to the source of your wc. (Edit: I just noticed you did use the OSX wc, you're just running it on Fedora. Sorry about that.)

But in any case using just wall clock time can be deceptive. Here is what I mean. On my machine, a somewhat old Mac Mini with a spinning disk, user CPU is only ~1/5 of the real time. The rest waiting for the OS or the disk.

  % for ((i=0;i<250;i++)); do cat /usr/share/dict/words >> a; done
  % /usr/bin/time wc -l a                                         
   58971500 a
          1.24 real         0.28 user         0.64 sys