Editing Dhrystone (section)

==Issues addressed by Dhrystone==
{{Unreferenced section|date=June 2021}}
Dhrystone's eventual importance as an indicator of general-purpose ("integer") performance of new computers made it a target for commercial compiler writers. Various modern compiler [[static code analysis]] techniques (such as [[dead code elimination|elimination of dead code]]: for example, code which uses the processor but produces internal results which are not used or output) make the use and design of synthetic benchmarks more difficult. Version 2.0 of the benchmark, released by Weicker and Richardson in March 1988, had a number of changes intended to foil a range of compiler techniques. Yet it was carefully crafted so as not to change the underlying benchmark.  This effort to foil compilers was only partly successful.  Dhrystone 2.1, released in May of the same year, had some minor changes and {{As of|2010|7|lc=on}} remains the current definition of Dhrystone.

Other than issues related to compiler optimization, various other issues have been cited with the Dhrystone. Most of these, including the small code size and small data set size, were understood at the time of its publication in 1984. More subtle is the slight over-representation of string operations, which is largely language-related: both Ada and Pascal have strings as normal variables in the language, whereas C does not, so what was simple variable assignment in reference benchmarks became buffer copy operations in the C library. Another issue is that the score reported does not include information which is critical when comparing systems such as which compiler was used, and what optimizations.

Dhrystone remains remarkably resilient as a simple benchmark, but its continuing value in establishing true performance is questionable.  It is easy to use, well documented, fully self-contained, well understood, and can be made to work on almost any system.  In particular, it has remained in broad use in the embedded computing world, though the recently developed [[EEMBC]] benchmark suite, the [[CoreMark]] standalone benchmark, HINT, Stream, and even Bytemark are widely quoted and used, as well as more specific benchmarks for the memory subsystem (Cachebench), TCP/IP (TTCP), and many others.