> Richard's objection, which you dismissed out of hand, was that your
> no-GC-tuning rule is silly in the light of actual uses of garbage
> collected programming languages on modern processors.  It makes your
> results unrealistic, and an unrealistic benchmark is misleading, or at
> best merely useless.

To the extent that this rule is the same for all languages and that most
languages on the shootout are also garbage collected, I think OCaml's
problem with this benchmark do point at a weakness of the current
GC code.

Of course, the shootout could be improved.  E.g. maybe it could allow
extra submissions that break the rules, along with a description of
which rules were broken and how.  Then there could be a "score according
to the rules", then a "score when all gloves are off", together with
some kind of "measure" of what was needed to go from one to the other.
This way people could maybe get a better feel for the languages's
performance and how (and how much) that performance can be affected.
Doesn't seem like an easy undertaking, tho.


        Stefan