Strange days we live in. Python and C++? What about a line of bash:

tr -s '[:space:]' '\n' < file.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

I’d like to know the memory profile of this. The bottleneck is obviously sort which buffers everything in memory. So if we replace this with awk using a hash map to keep count of unique words, then it’s a much smaller data set in memory:

tr -s '[:space:]' '\n' < file.txt | awk '{c[$0]++} END{for(w in c) print c[w], w}' | sort -rn

I’m guessing this will beat Python and C++?