The good old unix tool rewritten 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.
- 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
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
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 -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
$ 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] [ <=> ]
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
- Read stdin in case no file paths are provided
- Add line length flag L
- Add bytes flag c