They are toy examples as far as proxies for actual performance in real life. Unless real life code is a lot of n-body computations and FASTa searching, and it is run on a Debian OS with 4 core 64 bit machine (or other 3 configurations) performance need to be measured on a representative workload.
But what I was getting at is that those scores are non-toy like and important for PR purposes. And as you said, they represent how active or caring the community is (and how sensitive it is to its _perceived_ performance).
That's not the real problem with the shootout scores.
The problem is that in quest for optimization the code for many languages becomes very much non idiomatic. Therefore the result does not accurately reflect real life performance, where writing idiomatic code outweighs the benefit of iterating on something to the nth degree in search of micro optimizations.
But what I was getting at is that those scores are non-toy like and important for PR purposes. And as you said, they represent how active or caring the community is (and how sensitive it is to its _perceived_ performance).
So kudos to Rust community!