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I've accounted for IO cache, the test is running from an in-memory dataset

After checking a bit more, wc2 is indeed faster than wc in a specific use case: counting characters. That is, transforming a sequence of one or multiple bytes into meaningful character (wc --chars somefile).

In wc, the related code is here: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/wc.c#...

So in the end, wc uses the function while wc2 does not: https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/string/multibyte/mbrtoc32

Now, what I cannot tell : is wc2's code really comparable versus mbrtoc32 ? From a couple of tests, it works against ascii and utf8 dataset, but is that all ? Or are there edgecases cleverly handled by mbrtoc32 (with a performance cost) ?



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