[Shootout-list] X per second scoring system, resume

[Einar Karttunen]

On 30.09 06:20, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
> Startup and shutdown overhead are not well-understood on a per-test
> basis, at present.  Given a general lack of precision, I don't see
> reasonable fear in 'new overheads' compared to 'old overheads'.  I do
> see a reasonable fear of implementation work.

The shootout has many types of tests and having a per test startup
time would make things quite unfair. Think about a language that
does all initializations before main and one which does them in 
a lazy manner. 

Clearly this would penalize the language which is optimized so that real
code can start executing quickly.

And if the benchmark is an utility program then the additional startup
and shutdown costs *are* interesting and should be a part of the
benchmark.

- Einar Karttunen