These benchmark things reminds me of an anecdote I saw today in the D group: >Back in the 80's (!) computer magazines regularly ran C compiler benchmark result

These benchmark things reminds me of an anecdote I saw today in the D group: >Back in the 80's (!) computer magazines regularly ran C compiler benchmark results. (At one time I counted 30 C compilers available for the PC.) >I took a class at Standford on compilers, which included a lot of info on data flow analysis. I decided to implement it. Data flow analysis optimizations basically deleted the benchmark code, because it didn't do anything (lots of dead assignments). This compiler was released as Datalight Optimum C. >The article writer concluded that the compiler had a giant bug in it, because it ran the benchmarks impossibly fast, because it deleted the dead code. Instead of being lauded as the only C compiler on the PC that did global data flow analysis, it was labeled as a buggy piece of crap. >By the time we dug ourselves out of that PR disaster, other compilers had implemented it, too. >Ironically, these days DMD gets repeatedly charged with not doing data flow analysis, and clang is assumed to have invented data flow analysis. >Just goes to show the power of marketing