WordCount performance

[Frits van Bommel]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Georg Wrede wrote:
>> Hmm. What kind of situations would need multiple threads 
>> simultaneously reading from stdin? And if there aren't any, wouldn't 
>> locking be like wearing a life vest on land?
> 
> If it was unsynchronized, if you had two threads reading lines from the 
> input, the contents of the lines would be interleaved. With syncing, 
> each thread will get complete lines.

I believe his point was "What kind of program would ever want to do 
character-level stdin I/O from multiple threads?"
My follow-up would be: "And if there *is* some exotic program that needs 
to do that, why can't you just require it to provide its own damn 
locking, and leave the rest of us with faster I/O?" (Of course, I use 
Linux, so AFAIK I'm using glibc anyway)