replying to your update: yes, that's exactly the problem :o) if you start by assuming that sunspider is very fast because of dead code analysis then adding mo

replying to your update: yes, that's exactly the problem :o) if you start by assuming that sunspider is very fast because of dead code analysis then adding more dead code shouldn't change anything. but it does. so their deadcode analysis seems less like "real analysis" and more like "this looks like the sunspider test so we know we can ignore this piece of code". and if that is true then they are "cheating" because the result no longer reflects normal behaviour - it is tailored exactly for this test.