[chriswarbo]

> The solution to this is to deliver arguments at runtime, rather than baking them into the program as constants.

Functions already take their arguments at runtime. Except when they don't, due to optimisation.

For a benchmark to be automated, reproducible, etc. those constants have to be baked in somewhere, even if it's in a Haskell program using FFI (as in the article), or a shell script, etc. Whilst optimisers don't (yet) cross the language/process boundary, it still makes sense to include such sanity checks, rather than assuming we know what the optimiser will/won't do.

After all, the whole point of a benchmark is to gather evidence to question/ground the assumptions of our mental model. The less we assume, the better. The more evidence we gather, the better.