Word-Count on Posts about Software Development

Optimizing C++ Word Count

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 01:59:35 -0700

Yesterday’s post showed that the original C++ version is around 13 times slower than my non-optimized Rust version. Next, I’ll show how to get easily equivalent performance to Rust.

One problem that I immediately made out when first seeing the C++ version is that it uses std::regex. std::regex is known to be horribly slow ¹.

Just replacing the checking of the file name extension with the in-built e.path().extension() != ".txt" speeds up from 373 ms to 52ms!

Swift Word Count

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 00:30:28 -0700

Yesterday, I wrote about implementing word-count in Rust. Having never written Swift before¹, I wanted to try my hand at the same problem.

This is certainly not comparable to my Rust version or the C++ version ². Doing this in Swift just consisted of constant googling and the result is certainly not what a proficient Swifter would write.

Getting started

I created a new Swift package, and built it in the command line. All three commands need no explanation:

Rust Word Count

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 20:27:31 -0700

Last week there were two posts on the reputation of C++. In a noble effort, Jussi Pakkanen showcased modern C++. Nothing fancy, just clean and readable code. Unfortunately, around ten years after C++11, the news that simple (and safe) C++ code is now the default has not spread everywhere.

Jason Moiron answered with Go code doing the same (article). Both programs find the ten most common words in all txt files, which can be recursively found in the current directory.