[Vala] Why is Vala 10 times slower than C ?

[Serge Hulne <serge hulne gmail com>]

I used "wordcount" as a test to compare the processing speed of Vala against
C:


I obtained the following result:

---
C:
---
serge:vala serge2$ time wc ../shakespeare.txt
  495200 2703240 15862370 ../shakespeare.txt

real    0m0.194s
user    0m0.176s
sys    0m0.015s

---
Vala:
---
serge:vala serge2$ time ./hello
lc = 495201. wc = 3170980

real    0m2.258s
user    0m2.223s
sys    0m0.028s


-------

The vala code is as follows:

class HelloWorld : GLib.Object {
     public static int main(string[] args) {

            var f = FileStream.open("../shakespeare.txt", "r");
            var line = "";
            var wc = 0;
            var lc = 0;

            while (!f.eof()) {
                line = f.read_line(); lc++;
                if (line == null) break;
                //stdout.printf("line = %s\n", line);
                var words = line.split(" ");
                for (int i=0; i<words.length; i++) {
                    //stdout.printf("word = %s\n", words[i]);
                    wc++;
                }
            }

            stdout.printf("lc = %d. wc = %d\n", lc, wc);
            return 0;
      }
}