Benchmarks

The task: Write a program that reads a set of words from standard
input and prints the number of distinct words.

I came across a website that listed a few programs to accomplish this
task: http://unthought.net/c++/c_vs_c++.html (ignore all the language
flaming :-), and thought that all of them did unnecessary operations,
so I wrote my own. But for some reason, my version turned out slower
that ALL of the versions in the website, even though it seems to
perform less operations (yes, I benchmarked them on my own computer).

According to the website, the slowest version is:

#include <set>
#include <string>
#include <iostream>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
        // Declare and Initialize some variables
        std::string word;
        std::set<std::string> wordcount;
        // Read words and insert in rb-tree
        while (std::cin >> word) wordcount.insert(word);
        // Print the result
        std::cout << "Words: " << wordcount.size() << std::endl;
        return 0;
}

My version is about 12 times slower than that. It uses lower-level
constructs. Here it is:

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

struct SetNode
{
    char *word;
    struct SetNode *next;
};

// An unorderd set of words
//
static struct SetNode *gSet = 0;
static int gSetSize = 0;

#define kInitWordSize 32

// Returns a word read from stdin. The returned pointer must be
// deallocated with free().
//
static char *
ReadOneWord(void)
{
    int ch = getchar();

    while (ch != EOF && isspace(ch))
        ch = getchar();
    if (ch == EOF)
        return 0;

    char *word = (char *) malloc(kInitWordSize);
    if (!word)
        return 0;

    int size = kInitWordSize;
    int i = 0;

    while (ch != EOF && !isspace(ch)) {
        if (i >= size) {
            size *= 2;

            char *newWord = (char *) realloc(word, size);
            if (!newWord) {
                free(word);
                return 0;
            }
            word = newWord;
        }

        word[i++] = ch;
        ch = getchar();
    }

    if (i >= size) {
        size *= 2;

        char *newWord = (char *) realloc(word, size);
        if (!newWord) {
            free(word);
            return 0;
        }
        word = newWord;
    }
    word[i] = '\0';

    return word;
}

// Inserts a word into the set if it isn't in the set.
// The passed string is expected to have been allocated with
// a memory allocation function, and it should be considered
// lost after passed to this function.
//
static void
InsertWord(char *aWord)
{
    struct SetNode *node;

    for (node = gSet; node; node = node->next) {
        if (strcmp(node->word, aWord) == 0) {
            free(aWord);
            return;
        }
    }

    node = (struct SetNode *) malloc(sizeof(struct SetNode));
    if (!node) {
        free(aWord);
        return;
    }

    node->word = aWord;
    node->next = gSet;
    gSet = node;
    ++gSetSize;
}

static void
DeleteSet(void)
{
    struct SetNode *node = gSet;
    struct SetNode *temp;

    while (node) {
        temp = node;
        node = node->next;
        free(temp->word);
        free(temp);
    }

    gSet = 0;
    gSetSize = 0;
}

int
main(void)
{
    char *word;

    while ((word = ReadOneWord()))
        InsertWord(word);

    printf("Words: %d\n", gSetSize);

    // Skip cleanup for now...
    //DeleteSet();
}

Any ideas as to what causes the big slowdown?

Sebastian