add readme

README.md

@@ -1,2 +1,74 @@
 # linecount
-Superfast Line Counter
+linecount 1.0 Copyright 2015, Christien Rioux
+
+### Super-Fast Multi-Threaded Line Counter
+
+*linecount* is a tool that simply counts the number of lines in a file, as fast as possible. It reads the file in large chunks into several threads and quickly scans the file for line endings.
+
+Many times, you have to count the number of lines in text file on disk. The typical solution is to use 'wc -l' on the command line. 'wc' uses buffered streams to process the file, which has its advantages, but it is slower than direct memory mapped file access.
+
+How much faster is *linecount*? About 10 times faster than `wc` and 5 times faster than the naive Python implementation.
+
+To use *linecount*, just run the command line:
+
+```
+lc <file>
+```
+where *\<file\>* is the path to the file of which you'd like to count the lines. 
+
+###Help
+To get help with *linecount*:
+
+```
+lc -h
+usage: lc [options] <file>
+    -h  --help                         print this usage and exit
+    -b  --buffersize <BUFFERSIZE>      size of buffer per-thread to use when reading (default is 1MB)
+    -t  --threadcount <THREADCOUNT>    number of threads to use (defaults to number of cpu cores)
+    -v  --version                      print version information and exit
+```
+
+###Building
+
+To build *linecount*, we use *cmake*. Cmake 3.3.0 is the preferred version as of this release. For building just the command line utility on Windows, a Visual Studio 2013 solution file is also included.
+
+```
+cd build
+cmake ..
+make
+make install
+```
+
+This will build and install the command line utility `lc`, a shared library `liblinecount`, a static library `liblinecount_static`, and a header file `linecount.h`.
+
+Building *linecount* is known to be possible on
+
+```
+Windows 32/64 bit
+Mac OS X
+Linux
+``` 
+
+###Testing
+
+Testing cmake against `wc` and `python` can be done with the test scripts. To generate some random test files, run `create_testfiles.sh`, and four test files,    one 10MB, one 100MB, one 1GB, and one 10GB file will be created. Feel free to delete these when you're done testing to save space.
+
+To run the test, run `compare_testfiles.sh`. This will generate output as such:
+
+```
+Timing for lc
+lc: test_10MB.txt 0.006s
+lc: test_100MB.txt 0.015s
+lc: test_1GB.txt 0.127s
+lc: test_10GB.txt 1.196s
+Timing for python
+python: test_10MB.txt 0.025s
+python: test_100MB.txt 0.084s
+python: test_1GB.txt 0.661s
+python: test_10GB.txt 6.165s
+Timing for wc
+wc: test_10MB.txt 0.012s
+wc: test_100MB.txt 0.100s
+wc: test_1GB.txt 0.933s
+wc: test_10GB.txt 9.857s
+```