Why is reading lines from stdin much slower in C++ than Python?

Question

I wanted to compare reading lines of string input from stdin using Python and C++ and was shocked to see my C++ code run an order of magnitude slower than the equivalent Pyt

Answer 1

I reproduced the original result on my computer using g++ on a Mac.

Adding the following statements to the C++ version just before the while loop brings it inline with the Python version:

std::ios_base::sync_with_stdio(false);
char buffer[1048576];
std::cin.rdbuf()->pubsetbuf(buffer, sizeof(buffer));

sync_with_stdio improved speed to 2 seconds, and setting a larger buffer brought it down to 1 second.