Thanks for replying. I want to tell you that I feel deep regret for my impulse to publically shame you - even though I've gotten a lot of points for this comment, and did not really receive criticism for it.

Hey - if you make performance optimizations and compare implementations, it's probably best not to jump to quick conclusions. I would advise to brush up on C to get a feel for performance. Or, in times where it's popular to shit on C, and claim that it's not really a low-level language anymore, I would advise to write some assembler (which I've barely done). In practice it's unlikely that you find yourself in a situation where you can write code in a high-level language that runs considerably faster than what you could realistically write in C. The only situation where that can happen that I can see, is when the program does something that is so complicated but seems so arbitrary that you simply can't bring yourself to invest more time than what you need to hack together a quick Python script, and what you would be willing to write in C would be not even the asymptotically best approach that you can see.

For a simple program like wc, that situation does not apply, and if you find surprising results, it's best to first check for other possible reasons than "thousands of graybeards were wrong".