One thing both this article and the last one did was conflate their system's built in WC program with the C programming language. They also compared a bare-bon

One thing both this article and the last one did was conflate their system's built in WC program with the C programming language. They also compared a bare-bones wc program that only needs to care about the happy path versus one that needs to be fully featured and flexible (e.g. handling unicode with the -m flag, etc.) But with this approach it's also trivial to beat C with, well, C. (Actually I cheated a bit and used C++, but same idea. Got roughly 10x speedup in WSL on windows with a naive approach).