On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 10:25 AM, David Leimbach wrote:

I'm still trying to figure out what the point of the shootout really is.

From one point of view - http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/help.php#why

If there's no dedicated folks working with a language there, trying to make things run faster, a language will come out looking inefficient potentially.

If there isn't even one effective programmer willing to contribute tiny programs ...

There's a lot of compile flags and optimizations that can make a difference in probably all of the languages listed on that page.

The compile flags and optimizations used are shown below the program source code.