You included Awk in the title, but omitted Go, really?

Indeed. The original title is:

> Performance comparison: counting words in Python, Go, C++, C, AWK, Forth, and Rust.

Which means the submitter actively chose Go to be removed from the title. Judging from their post history they are aligned with Rust community.

The original title is 2 characters over the HN title length limit. I suspect they dropped "Go" first, because it's the language which has a 2-letter name, and they they editorialised it further to hint that there are more languages.

Leaving Awk over the vastly more popular Go, hints a more probable and frequent behaviour: bias.

Removing any of them would suffice.

The author maintains an AWK implementation:

https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk