Same here. bff [1] has no fancy assembly, not even a compiler, just some basic loop unrolling and jump precomputation, but I too wonder how it compares to wc.

Same here. bff [1] has no fancy assembly, not even a compiler, just some basic loop unrolling and jump precomputation, but I too wonder how it compares to wc. [1] https://github.com/apankrat/bff/ https://github.com/apankrat/bff/ -- edit -- Found words.txt with 466551 words, so replicating it 28 times gets it to the OP's test size. Bff is ~5x slower than 'wc -w' ... which is not unexpected, but still slightly disappointing. https://github.com/dwyl/english-words/blob/master/words.txt?raw=true https://github.com/dwyl/english-words/blob/master/words.txt?...