A howl on the wind…

The task: Write a portable tool that takes a file name as first argument, and from that file outputs the number of lines, the longest line, the length of the longest line, and the line number of the longest line, in a binary-safe fashion (meaning, \n is the only reason a line should be delimited; embedded \0s may occur).

My sinister side goal is showing how complex the C code has to be in order to get performance near C++. It is possible to write a simpler version in C that is 20% faster for /usr/share/dict/words, but it is then 4x slower for the random files. It would also be possible to write a faster non-portable version using memory mapping, but can’t really call that simple. C++ has both readability and speed. If I missed some obvious portable optimization in the C code, let me know…

The contestants are:

http://tinodidriksen.com/uploads/code/c/hex-to-text.c

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

int main() {
    char buf[] = "54657374";
    size_t len = strlen(buf);

    if (len & 1) {
        printf("Cannot take hex from odd length string.\n");
        exit(1);
    }

    char *result = (char*)malloc(len/2 + 1);
    memset(result, 0, len/2 + 1);
    for (size_t i = 0 ; i < len/2 ; ++i) {
        char tmp[3] = {buf[i*2], buf[i*2+1], 0};
        result[i] = (char)strtol(tmp, NULL, 16);
    }

    printf("%s converted to %s\n", buf, result);
    free(result);

    return 0;
}