Build your own wc tool

A solution to John Crickett's Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-wc

Install:

git clone git@github.com:DonClaveau3/ccwc.git
cd ccwc
go install

Examples:

print newline, word, and byte counts for test.txt

$ ccwc test.txt
  7145  58164 342190 test.txt

print newline, word, and byte counts for stdin

$ cat test.txt | ccwc
  7145  58164 342190

usage info

$ ccwc --help
ccwc is a CLI app that imitates the behavior of wc.
This application is a solution to a coding challenge found here:
https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-wc

Usage:
  ccwc [flags] [path to file]

Flags:
  -c, --bytes   print the byte counts
  -m, --chars   print the character counts
  -h, --help    help for ccwc
  -l, --lines   print the newline counts
  -w, --words   print the word counts

Resources I found helpful:

• Installing WSL
• Connecting to GitHub w/ SSH
• Cobra framework for creating CLIs in Go
• Converting int64 to string
• Efficient line count algorithm by JimB
• golang unit testing
• Counting characters
• SBCS vs MBCS
• Glossary of globalization concepts

Built on VS Code running in WSL: Ubuntu
Tested against wc (GNU coreutils) 8.32

Personal notes:

• I created this during 6 evening sessions (mostly weekends) after putting the kid to bed
• Something that surprised me as I started the project was that it wasn't a tutorial. Given only desired behavior and a test file, I had to go learn things on my own, and make decisions. And I liked that
• The first thing I had to figure out was how to run man wc on my personal Windows machine. I had been wanting to set up WSL after reading DHH's recent endorsement. This project provided an opportunity to kick the tires a bit on that
• Then I needed to choose a language. I wanted to try a new language and surveys say Go is popular, so I went with that. Some things that stood out as I got the feel of the language:
  • nil instead of null
  • types go after names in declarations (like Typescript)
  • unused variables prevent compiling. this was irritating when methods returned multiple values, but I was only interested in one of them. it also led to a fair amount of clutter related to error handling. I suspect this is either a safety feature of the language or I just didn't look hard enough for alternative approaches
  • there seem to be strong conventions about where to clone go projects relative to GOPATH. this felt odd as I'm used to keeping all projects in /dev or /src
  • I initially intended a monorepo that would hold solutions to multiple coding challenges. I abandoned this approach after the go module seemed to want to be at the git root.
• After I figured out how to run early versions of my script, I looked for ways to build it as an executable. The Cobra framework came up in my searches. Used by k8s and docker? Sounds good! Other solutions that also used Cobra:
  • https://github.com/mquhuy/ccwc
  • https://github.com/brarkaran/ccwc
  • https://github.com/lednhatkhanh/ccwc
• This was my first non-school project published to a public repository. I created this account several years ago with a desire to contribute to open source projects on the side. That hasn't happened because life. Career development energy mostly goes to watching Pluralsight courses related to work projects. It was refreshing to tackle a challenge originating outside of work as it allowed me to study concepts I would not have otherwise.
• Through the process, I had a few questions that I would like to explore in the future:
  • What should I know about software licenses?
  • How do I make a manual entry (man ccwc) for an app?
  • How could I create tests at the interface level?
  • How would I create a performance benchmarking tool to test my solution against others?
  • What could I learn from reviewing other people's solutions?
• There were some strange formatting behaviors in the wc tool. For example, sometimes the output would begin with 2 spaces and sometimes with 3 spaces. Why is that? Why are there 2 spaces between newline count and word count in the default output, but only 1 space between every other part? For the sake of this project, I imitated what I saw. But it would be interesting to investigate the source
• I noticed that the challenge doesn't include all features of wc. Notably missing are the -L flag and multiple file inputs.