FYI I ran on the worldcities data at https://github.com/petewarden/dstkdata (credit to xsv for choosing that dataset) against https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv and https://github.com/liquidaty/zsv (full disclosure: I am one of the zsv authors). Here's what I got.

fastest to slowest: zsv (0.07), xsv (0.16), goawk (0.42), python (~1.6)

Obviously, does not tell the whole story as this test was limited to "count" and an interpreted language is expected to always be slower compared to a precompiled command, but, it might be relevant to a user deciding what tool to use. Also, might be instructive as to room for improvement in the go code (or possibly the go code could use the c lib)-- I note that even if the goawk command is '{}' the runtime is still about the same.

full results:

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goawk:

1000001 7000007 real 0m0.435s user 0m0.435s sys 0m0.031s

1000001 7000007 real 0m0.413s user 0m0.419s sys 0m0.024s

1000001 7000007 real 0m0.425s user 0m0.430s sys 0m0.024s

xsv:

1000000 real 0m0.157s user 0m0.141s sys 0m0.013s

1000000 real 0m0.156s user 0m0.141s sys 0m0.012s

1000000 real 0m0.158s user 0m0.142s sys 0m0.013s

zsv:

1000000 real 0m0.066s user 0m0.053s sys 0m0.010s

1000000 real 0m0.077s user 0m0.060s sys 0m0.012s

1000000 real 0m0.069s user 0m0.056s sys 0m0.010s

python:

1000001 7000007 real 0m1.589s user 0m1.553s sys 0m0.026s

1000001 7000007 real 0m1.583s user 0m1.550s sys 0m0.025s

1000001 7000007 real 0m2.122s user 0m1.675s sys 0m0.037s

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The script for this was:

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echo 'goawk:'

(time goawk -i csv '{ w+=NF } END { print NR, w }' < worldcitiespop_mil.csv) 2>&1 | xargs

(time goawk -i csv '{ w+=NF } END { print NR, w }' < worldcitiespop_mil.csv) 2>&1 | xargs

(time goawk -i csv '{ w+=NF } END { print NR, w }' < worldcitiespop_mil.csv) 2>&1 | xargs

echo 'xsv:'

(time xsv count < worldcitiespop_mil.csv) 2>&1 | xargs

(time xsv count < worldcitiespop_mil.csv) 2>&1 | xargs

(time xsv count < worldcitiespop_mil.csv) 2>&1 | xargs

echo 'zsv:'

(time zsv count < worldcitiespop_mil.csv) 2>&1 | xargs

(time zsv count < worldcitiespop_mil.csv) 2>&1 | xargs

(time zsv count < worldcitiespop_mil.csv) 2>&1 | xargs

echo 'python:'

(time python3 count.py < worldcitiespop_mil.csv) 2>&1 | xargs

(time python3 count.py < worldcitiespop_mil.csv) 2>&1 | xargs

(time python3 count.py < worldcitiespop_mil.csv) 2>&1 | xargs