Re: 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:

// 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;
    }