Internet Explorer 9 Caught Cheating In SunSpider 360
dkd903 writes "A Mozilla engineer has uncovered something embarrassing for Microsoft – Internet Explorer is cheating in the SunSpider Benchmark. The SunSpider, although developed by Apple, has nowadays become a very popular choice of benchmark for the JavaScript engines of browsers."
3 possible explanations, so why accuse? (Score:4, Interesting)
There are three possible explanation for this weird result from Internet Explorer:
1. Microsoft cheated by optimizing Internet Explorer 9 solely to ace the SunSpider Bechmark. To me, this seems like the best explanation.
2. Microsoft engineers working on Internet Explorer 9 could have been using the SunSpider Benchmark and unintentionally over-optimized the JavaScript engine for the SunSpider Benchmark. This seems very unlikely to me.
3. A third option (suggested in Hacker News) might be that this is an actual bug and adding these trivial codes disaligns cache tables and such throwing off the performance entirely. If this is the reason, it raises a serious question about the robustness of the engine.
So, what proof do we have that Microsoft actually cheated?
Re:Embarassing? (Score:2, Interesting)
anyone who says libertarian doesn't understand the conflict in the term. it's basically republicans who don't want to be called republicans or someone who hates both parties but still leans republican. if someone declares themselves independent libertarian, then they're more acknowledging that they don't necessarily align with "libertarian" views. I have a friend like this, and it's basically republican but he doesnt' want to admit it.
Re:Three explanations FTFA (Score:5, Interesting)
And, then Taco should treat the author's biased opinion as fact? Remember, the title of this post is "Internet Explorer 9 Caught Cheating in SunSpider."
I don't think so.
And, where is the response from MS? Did anyone ask MS, or did someone find this and go "MS is CHEATING!!11!!one!" without actually investigating or even asking MS? Because, it really looks like the latter, which would make this just more MS bashing blogspam.
Re:Embarassing? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Embarassing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Insiders selling company stock is always a Red Flag for investors. Whether that is justified or not in this case is up to the individual to decide, but it's a Red Flag for a reason ... very often it means problems within the company and bad news follows.
There are perfectly good reasons for insider selling, and it helps to be very straightforward about it ... it's not like you can hide it anyway, it's reported and watched vigorously.
Not being a Microsoft investor, and not particularly interested in their area of the market, it's not really important to me. But, if it were, I'd be very wary of the level of stock he's liquidating ... 25% is a massive sell by the usual standards. 5% is probably not going to raise too many eyebrows ... even 10% might be OK under the right circumstances.
But, since he can always pledge stock to back up any personal investment, this level is worrisome, I would think. It really means he's moving his money out of tech. And he's the CEO of a huge tech player. This is an unusual development by any investor standard.
Re:Embarassing? (Score:3, Interesting)
anyone who says libertarian doesn't understand the conflict in the term. it's basically republicans who don't want to be called republicans or someone who hates both parties but still leans republican. if someone declares themselves independent libertarian, then they're more acknowledging that they don't necessarily align with "libertarian" views. I have a friend like this, and it's basically republican but he doesnt' want to admit it.
I like to think of a Libertarian as a Republican that smokes pot and/or downloads porn. It could also be a Democrat who hates paying taxes to a federal government that either wastes the money or gives to someone who does not deserve it.
precompiled (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually MS hosts a huge repository of precompiled javascript snippets gathered by bing crawler and precompiled by M$, then IE just looks up correct snippets as bytecode in local snippet database and executes them fast.
So what they stumbled upon was a published javascript snippet that had a bytecode, so here the fast result.
However modified snippets will be downloaded as soon as bing crawls that discussion, and precompiled again, and pushed into next updates.
However the initial test was written poorly by using dead code. What if Mozilla decides to do deadcode optimization? Good test should actually check if calculated values do match (of course this doesn't exclude option of M$ precompiling actual function results)
Re:Embarassing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I can't speak for right libertarians but for left libertarians it's easy. We don't think the solution to political problems is to throw money at them, we think there are underlying systemic problems that need to be addressed, in a fundamental way rather than a patchwork way.
Poverty doesn't exist because the government doesn't have adequate social programs to funnel money into the hands of poor people; poverty exists because wealth is power and is used to leverage more wealth and power. The genesis of wealth is the conversion of public property into private, which is to say theft from society. And this wealth was not created in a market, but in feudal societies with brutal enforcement of class. It was preserved when the "enlightened" transitioned to markets.
All of these shenanigans are shielded by even the most "liberal" governments, not surprisingly run by the same wealth interests. Nuts to the lot of them.
Re:Embarassing? (Score:4, Interesting)
First of all, I (and I'll not speak for all left libertarians here, as there is some debate on the matter, but I think I'm expressing the majority opinion) distinguish "personal property" (that is, what you own and use) from "private property" (that is, property owned privately, usually by an organization, but not owned or used by an individual, and leveraged to extract profit). This distinction is important before any discussion of any wealth-distribution theory.
Personal property is personal property. I can think of scarce few real leftists (which is to say, true socialists, communists, anarcho-communists, left-libertarians, etc) who include personal property when they say "property is theft". Private property, on the other hand, being the spoils of a great and sustained theft from the public, belong to the public and should be returned to the public.
Note here that I do not mean the state when I say public. Which is to say that I'm not an advocate for systems like the Soviet Union, but I am an advocate for movements like the worker takeover of factories we see in some Latin American countries.
In short, I advocate taking back what was stolen from us.
Re:Do not attribute to malice ... (Score:1, Interesting)
Does your experience include working on a compiler at all? This is pretty easy to see how this happens. You have an algorithm for performing dead code elimiation, a common optimization for most languages but apparently not very common in the JavaScript world yet. Let's say this algorithm is implemented by performing an analysis of the AST (even if they first transform to a DAG nothing really changes). When you go to implement this algorithm you do so in a conservative fashion - that is you opt-in the specific nodes of the AST you understand (assignment, loops, conditionals, etc...) and as you walk the AST you check that all of the nodes you understand have no external side effects. For nodes that you don't understand, or that you know have side effects, you give up and compile the code. Because none of your benchmarks with dead code include return statements or expression statements you never write the code to understand these nodes and the DCE optimization becomes disabled. Viola, you have the exact behavior seen here - no cheating necessary.
Re:Benchmarks (Score:3, Interesting)
You're assuming that DCE is actually working properly. If it isn't, then true; will be compiled to a load of the true singleton (or a constant value if it's not implemented as an object). This would result in some register churn, which (especially on x86) would cause some spills to the stack.
If they're not properly aligning stuff on the stack, then spilling true; could mean that every other spill is not word aligned anymore, which could case some serious performance problems, especially if one of the values is now spanning two cache lines. You need to be impressively incompetent to do that, but I wouldn't put that level of incompetence past the IE team...