[hnlmorg]

He's not handling unicode and it's been well demonstrated in the past that unicode handling adds a lot to computation time in tests like these (it often comes up in grep benchmarks too).

I'd be interested to see the same tests but with a non-unicode local set, IIRC:

    LC_ALL=C

I'd wager the C version would perform much better in that test.

[jstimpfle]

Don't forget to export the variable, or run like "LC_ALL=C wc ...", or otherwise the locale won't apply.