[TUHS] Bell Labs sed performance

[John Cowan via TUHS]

On Mon, Mar 23, 2026 at 5:05 AM Diomidis Spinellis via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
wrote:

Amazingly, in four benchmarks the Bell Labs implementation is
> still the fastest.  At 1850 lines of code (including a regular
> expression engine) it's also the smallest one (FreeBSD, 2672 LoC; GNU
> 5462; Rust, 8946).  Admittedly, modern sed versions have more features.
> Still, one can only admire the design and craftsmanship that went into
> the original implementation.
>

If you have time, you might want to benchmark the old GNU sed, which is
also Minix sed. The current version (1.16) lives at <
http://dl.exactcode.de/oss/minised/minised-1.15.tar.gz>.  It's only
slightly longer than the Bell Labs sed at 1868 LoC.