Microsoft Caught Cheating in the Sunspider Benchmark

i do not consider it cheating

i also strongly suspect that similar activities were performed by other browser vendors as well. sometimes two implementations are equal in almost everything, but one is present in tests and other one isnt. it is quite normal to include the first one.

ie9′ dead code removal is effective it seems and taylored for most common cases (how often you use — in your code? ++ is the thing to optimise for if you can pick only one)

if you are a coder (i doubt, but who knows) get some opensource repo JS code, and run static analysis and compare how often ‘++’ appears compared to ‘–’ or ”)

anyhow, js seriously needs new benchmarks. how come opera never made one (they claim they are useless, but like to brag about them anyway, and always moan that others did it wrong..)

eeer… not

first – optimizing for EVERYTHING means no optimization at all. i’ll stand by my previous claim that it is very possible, that obscure operators like ‘–’ or ” (use != instead) will NOT be taken into account. it takes time to do DCE and as gains are relatively small, doing it for all makes little sense.

second – i havent seen analysis on how it performs in other scripts and cases. all i see is angry talk, no code that i can download and see for myself. until i see proof that ie did DCE for sunspider ONLY, then i’ll remain believing that they were not cheating

third – opera should have produced benchmark. they are the only browser entity that didnt, and they are the browser entity that moans the loudest. their employees like to poke at others (Haavard – opvard at twitter) but when it comes to real work, they have nothing to show in this area. less talk, more work dear opera. you dont earn respect and recognition with words in this business.

fourth – belittle me more. wow, so there ARE OTHER BENCHMARKS? oh noes.. mr obvious.

ie team show sunspider from the beginning of ie9 development. they started when ie9 looked VERY bad, and they are showing progress. given that benchamrks arent ideal, it is the progress that might mean more than raw results. and progress they indeed.

i still consider it fair (until somebody stop barking and start working and produce code that should, but does not start DCE in ie9).

there should be new benchmarks. less syntetic, more ‘real world’ (including common human mistakes in coding, like idiotic use of hand made functions over built-in implementations etc)

first: hard to do any tests using remote desktop on ipad in the middle of south african village (im on holidays). typing is hard enough and lag kills me.

second: your 100 lines-of-text comment has almost no informational value just loud babbling

optimizing for everything in DCE is in fact optimizing nothing! DCE is a ‘risk evaluation’ technique. it has a high cost, and doing it for EVERYTHING is in fact not optimizing at all. too much overhead for too many corner cases.

it might lead to situation when it is much more costly than not doing it at all.

compilers have easier time, because they.. well.. take their time to compile. JS is executed on the spot.

as for the specifics of ie9, i have yet to see a link presented by you that shows more than it is listed in this article.

adding ‘return’ or adding ‘return true’ DOES change things A LOT, because if function returns, then you cannot just skip it entirely – it isnt dead-weight code, so it must be evaluated and probably this part of DCE is a) not implemented yet b) deemed to be more costly than executing script itself. it is risk taking, and can be tweaked and probably will be.

opera is a hypocrisy-driven company. they ‘do not believe in benchmarks’ but they BRAG A LOT about how fast opera in these benchmarks is (and sure it is, no denial here). they criticize other benchmarks, yet, they do not show anything for themselves IN THIS AREA (learn to read). they stomped on MS when MS provided tests for recently-famous HTML5 test, yet they themselves delivered 3 tests, that all were included. and they SHOUTED loudly that that test was biased towards the MS. no kidding?! all browsers were free to send testcases, MS did, others didnt, but it was opera that whined.

in real-world testing opera fails, because it is almost not compatible with anything today. and it is not because browser sniffing, it is because opera devs long ago did too much sniffing of the ‘we know it all’. and now they have borked: key events (all of them), Function.prototype.bind, history navigation back (google instant), various ommisions in getters/setters etc. they always tried to swim upstream, and it will haunt them forever. look at this blog and at this post in particular: http://my.opera.com/sitepatching/blog/show.dml/21280702 (copying links on ipad sux)

and see for yourself, that most of opera incompatibilities lies in opera OWN bugs

as for your snide remark about my professional career.. i wish youd ever enjoy your work, company, colleagues and salary as much as i do.