Yes you're right, it's not trying to do what `sort` is doing, it's trying to reproduce the output of `sort | uniq -c | sort -n` which is a more specialized but

Yes you're right, it's not trying to do what `sort` is doing, it's trying to reproduce the output of `sort | uniq -c | sort -n` which is a more specialized but common task. But you're right - it will be limited by RAM in a way the unix tools are not. I did add a test with sort using a larger buffer size to the benchmarks as well.