A very nice (longish but enjoyable) read this morning. Performance comparison: counting words in Python, C/C++, Awk, Rust, and more - https://benhoyt.com/writings/count-words/

N.B. the "optimized" awk example is just the normal way to do it in awk. 🙂 I'm pleasantly surprised by the performance of the Java version. OTOH, the Common Lisp implementation looks like it was written by someone who doesn't know very much CL. 🤷🏻‍♂️

that's one of the problem with contrived examples for benchmarks, the implementation quality is disputed, as is the task for comparison

That, and very few real programs spend all their time doing <whatever microbenchmark>.

For benchmarking this is not a good task. As the kind of thing I write all the time, the start of an interview for fresh grads, it's not so bad. Let's see now. Hmm, this Ruby smells...

counts = Hash.new(0)
STDIN.each_line { |line| line.downcase.split.each { |w| counts[w] += 1 }}
counts.sort_by { |k,v| -v }.each { |k,v| puts "#{k} #{v}" }

old. A quick round of golf:

STDIN.flat_map{_1.downcase.split}.
  tally.sort_by{-_2}.
  each{puts _1.join(" ")}

It only goes to show that counting things is a common Rubyism. Games like this always remind me of the The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer https://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~robin/class/449/Evolution.htm.