On Monday, 7 January 2013 at 20:23:37 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
I've also seen benchmarks where the compiler was blamed, where malloc, or printf, or strcpy, or whatever was the actual dominant cycle sucker. Or even that the wrong compiler switches were used. Yes, I've seen magazines publish benchmarks where the 'slow' compiler was used with debug switches on, and the 'fast' compiler had the optimization switches on.
Sounds rigged. I know I've heard of benchmarks from years ago where a windows server system (2000?) was against a linux server; The windows machine had like a gig of memory and a bunch of other snazzy hardware, while the linux machine was giving the bare minimum to run the server (32-128Mb). Also I think Microsoft was the one doing the benchmarks... :)
