Best way to simulate “group by” from bash?

Question

Suppose you have a file that contains IP addresses, one address in each line:

10.0.10.1
10.0.10.1
10.0.10.3
10.0.10.2
10.0.10.1

You need a

Answer 1

Pure bash (no fork!)

There is a way, using a bash function. This way is very quick as there is no fork!...

... While bunch of ip addresses stay small!

countIp () { 
    local -a _ips=(); local _a
    while IFS=. read -a _a ;do
        ((_ips[_a<<24|${_a[1]}<<16|${_a[2]}<<8|${_a[3]}]++))
    done
    for _a in ${!_ips[@]} ;do
        printf "%.16s %4d\n" \
          $(($_a>>24)).$(($_a>>16&255)).$(($_a>>8&255)).$(($_a&255)) ${_ips[_a]}
    done
}

Note: IP addresses are converted to 32bits unsigned integer value, used as index for array. This use simple bash arrays, not associative array (wich is more expensive)!

time countIp < ip_addresses 
10.0.10.1    3
10.0.10.2    1
10.0.10.3    1
real    0m0.001s
user    0m0.004s
sys     0m0.000s

time sort ip_addresses | uniq -c
      3 10.0.10.1
      1 10.0.10.2
      1 10.0.10.3
real    0m0.010s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.000s

On my host, doing so is a lot quicker than using forks, upto approx 1'000 addresses, but take approx 1 entire second when I'll try to sort'n count 10'000 addresses.