I was inspired by the constant stream of post on HN about beating C with X, where X is the author favorite pet language. I wanted it to be idiomatic but not too complex (no hand-optimized vectorization for instance). This is a typical high-performance portable C code. It is not multi-threaded, because who needs it when 1 core is enough ? (Adding multi-threading with OpenMP is trivial though, if needs arise).
make
./wc <file>
On my old system (Thinkpad X61 / Core2 Duo T7300 @2.00GHz / DDR2), it exhibits around 2.5-cycles/byte, eg. processing 750MB in roughly 1.5s when the file is in the page cache. On a high-end Skylake server (Xeon Gold 6146 @3.20GHz / DDR4) it is ridiculously fast with around 0.15-cycles/byte. I am confident it can beat the pants off of multi-threaded implementations in those other toy languages :)