[@euant](https://forum.nim-lang.org/postActivity.xml#18478): I timed your code but I didn't see a consistent speed-up. Sometimes it was a few milliseconds faster, sometimes slower, so I would guess it and the original compile down to the same C. But I like the idea that there are still tweaks to be made to such a short program.
[@jlp765](https://forum.nim-lang.org/postActivity.xml#18479): I watched a talk last year where the speaker — I forget who it was — explained why they stopped writing Python extensions in plain C and started using Cython. Although he was competent at C, the C produced by Cython was _exemplary_, and far better than anything he could produce. It could be the same with Nim: the C produced by Nim's compiler is better than the C found in [libc](https://sourceforge.net/projects/libcsv/). Having said that, the C program was only six milliseconds slower than the Nim program, averaged over ten runs of a short benchmark (count 50,000 fields in a CSV). That's basically within the margin of error.
