[0xd34df00d]

> For reference, I'm referring to the "oops I did it again" part. It's really hard to take that comment as "honours go to GHC authors".

Was overly excited when I created the repo after obtaining the first results. Childish indeed, thanks for reminding, fixed.

> Also, I suggest you try running the GNU wc with unicode turned off because unicode is computationally expensive and you're deliberately disabling unicode support in your own code anyway.

I tried running wc as `LC_ALL=C wc file.txt`, and it (surprisingly for me) resulted in worse run time for wc (my default locale is ru_RU.UTF-8 for comparison). This reproduced on two machines of mine and also on a machine of a friend of mine who also gave my code a shot.

My bad for omitting this in the post, I'll update it accordingly.

[hnlmorg]

wc running slower seems wrong. I wonder if it's doing additional sanitising because your LANG differs from your LC_ALL. I'd need to read through the code to get a handle on what it does and doesn't expect though but I definitely wouldn't expect wc to run slower.