wc-rs

The good old unix tool rewritten in Rust.

Why write it in Rust?

I wanted to learn Rust and this seemed like a small and simple enough project to get started with. To my surprise this naive implementation turned out to be faster than the original C implementation of wc, take a look at some numbers. This is my first rust project so it might contain some bad code, please raise an issue if you find any room for improvment within the codebase.

Install

• To download and install using cargo run cargo install wc-rs
• If you don't have cargo just grab the binary from the releases page and put it in your bin
• To build from source

    git clone https://github.com/palash25/wc-rs.git
    cd wc-rs/
    cargo build --release
  

Usage

Same as the standard wc command that is shipped with every linux distro.

$ wc-rs --help

USAGE:
    wc-rs [FLAGS] [FILE]...

FLAGS:
    -m, --chars      prints the character counts
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -l, --lines      prints the newline counts
    -V, --version    Prints version information
    -w, --words      print the words counts

ARGS:
    <FILE>...    file path(s) to run wc-rs on

Stats

Testing with a denser 10 million line file

This is where things start to slow down a little. This file has double the number of characters than the previous one and almost double the size (~250MB)

Time test

$ \time -p wc-rs big-and-chonky.txt
10048951    31711680    274285495  big-and-chonky.txt

real 4.72   user 4.67   sys 0.04

$ \time -p ./target/release/wc-rs big-and-chonky.txt
10048951	31711680	274285495  big-and-chonky.txt

real 1.89   user 1.36   sys 0.53

PV test

$ wc-rs big-and-chonky.txt | pv
10048951    31711680    274285495   big-and-chonky.txt

46 B 0:00:04 [9.81 B/s] [  <=>                  ]

$ ./target/release/wc-rs big-and-chonky.txt | pv
10048951    31711680    274285495   big-and-chonky.txt

55 B 0:00:01 [29.2 B/s] [  <=>                  ]

Hyperfine benchmarks

GNU wc

  Benchmark #1: wc big-file-1 big-file-2

  Time (mean ± σ):     24.849 s ±  1.183 s    [User: 24.538 s, System: 0.309 s]
  Range (min … max):   23.628 s … 26.437 s    10 runs

wc-rs

  Benchmark #1: ./Projects/wc/target/release/wc-rs big-file-1 big-file-2

  Time (mean ± σ):      9.298 s ±  0.224 s    [User: 6.519 s, System: 2.777 s]
  Range (min … max):    9.086 s …  9.674 s    10 runs

TODO

• Read stdin in case no file paths are provided
• Add line length flag L
• Add bytes flag c