Token Efficiency: 16 Algorithms, 5 Languages, Zero Guesswork
rust
dev.to
Who this is for. If you use LLMs to generate code — or pay for API tokens — this article shows exactly where your budget goes. Every number is reproducible. No opinions, just data. In previous articles, we explained why tokens are expensive (quadratic attention cost) and how BPE tokenization works. Now we show the full data: 16 algorithms implemented in 5 languages, every token counted with tiktoken (cl100k_base). Methodology Tokenizer: tiktoken cl100k_base (used by GPT-4, GPT-4o,