It's probably to avoid dead-code elimination, which would defeat the purpose of the benchmark. The rust benchmarks use test::black_box [0], which does the same

It's probably to avoid dead-code elimination, which would defeat the purpose of the benchmark. The rust benchmarks use test::black_box [0], which does the same thing, so there's no unfair advantage there. [0]: http://doc.rust-lang.org/test/fn.black_box.html http://doc.rust-lang.org/test/fn.black_box.html