> And I think we did things that most programmers would be able to do:
> Get a base line for how fast we can zcat a file
> Use perf top to find some bottlenecks that can be addressed
> Look at the data to understand what the common case is
These are reasonable statements to make for people writing software in low level languages. They will frequently use those tools and make those considerations. The original code the author is referring to was written in Python by a person who specializes in data science, using mostly Python (according to their CV). The subsequent port into Rust was done because of claims of it being faster, but I wouldn’t necessarily expect someone primarily working in Python and performing a one-off port into a language they don’t regularly work in, specialized for a space they don’t regularly work in (systems programming) to know these things. It’s always cool to see performance and code length golfing exercises, but the argument that “most programmers would be able to do” the intuited evaluative scoping steps isn’t necessarily fair — not all programmers are working at lower levels of abstraction that warrant being necessarily aware of those tools.