He's saying that all the fastest benchmarks game programs in all languages cheat, relative to the slowest ones. :P This isn't an attack on your capacity as the site's maintainer, this is an entirely expected outcome due to the high-profile nature of the site. He's saying that random tests on the internet are "better" because they attract less attention and thus have less exposure. It's a problem with microbenchmarks in general.
Your defensiveness is unwarranted and your interpretation assumes bad faith.
> So programs that are compiled cheat, relative to programs
> that are interpreted?
Programming languages whose dominant implementations are interpreted generally (though don't necessarily need to) provide less direct control over hardware, memory layout, and algorithms, and in practice will defer to C via FFI when such control is necessary. Because the benchmarks game generally prohibits calling out to C, it means that many "tricks" employed by low-level languages are unavailable to the higher-level languages. Whether or not this is a desirable property is up to the reader's interpretation.
> Seems like "cheat" needs to be in scare quotes.
Indeed, because it's essentially impossible to enforce anything like "idiomatic" code in any of the benchmarks game languages, and so whether a program is "cheating" is up to the reader's interpretation. That said, the fact that it is up to the reader's interpretation means that it is valid for some readers to conclude that some programs are "cheating", while other programmers may differ. Personally, I think the point is moot, and that microbenchmarks aren't worth getting so worked up over. :P
