Comment Re:Do not attribute to malice ... (Score 1) 360
The second example--a general optimization of the engine that over-optimizes a corner case--is very difficult to pull off in these engines. When you consider that the over-optimization only occurs when the source is aligned a certain way things become very suspicious, because the engine isn't running against the source but an abstract representation of the code.
In today's engines there are also routines to strip out unnecessary and unreachable code, which is relevant because the code snippets added by the tester were extraneous and (slashdotted, so going from memory) unreachable. This means the bytecode would either have been generated and stripped or not generated at all.
Then consider that these engines are not actually running the bytecode but machine-optimizing it. So now you have a case where:
1. Extraneous and unreachable code is added
2. Extraneous and unreachable code is removed by the compiler to bytecode
3. The bytecode is further optimized to machine code
4. The code is executed
Step 4 is where the optimization is lost. This is why it's extremely unlikely that someone checked in code to attempt to optimize the engine which resulted in an over-optimization of the corner case.