tmikov / linebench

Benchmarks for reading a text file line by line

README

linebench

A collection of simple benchmarks for reading a text file line by line and printing it. The techniques used are supposed to be easy for each corresponding language/ environment. The results are surprising.

• C++ iostreams and std::getline()

• stdio gets/puts

• GNU readline

• A scanner generated by FLEX

• Python

Building

It has only been tested under MacOSX but it is expected it will work without any modification under Linux. Windows is not supported, though it could probably work under Cygwin. Contributions improving portability are welcome.

It requires CMake v2.8 or later. To build, in the source directory:

mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
make

Then to run, from within the build directory we just created:

../run-bench.sh .. sample-input.txt

Results

On a test machine:

Method	time	factor
C gets	0.590s	1x
C++ iostreams	0.295s	0.51x
FLEX scanner	0.782s	1.33x
C GNU readline	0.474s	0.80x
Python	1.985s	3.3x
NodeJS	1.089s	1.86x