[gnulinux]

> It's weird

It's not weird, this is standard in academic computer science. It would be weird to do otherwise. In a theoretical dissertation/paper like this you can't just randomly bring up compiled assembly, it's completely and utterly off topic, it's not any more on topic than bringing up if the code was ran by an interpreter, or JVM, or transpiled to Haskell, or ran on GPU etc...

[amelius]

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."

-- Edsger W. Dijkstra

However, I do believe that astronomers put references to the actual instruments they used in their publications.

[xmcqdpt2]

So do most algorithms papers that have benchmarks in them. It's not always useful though, because information about how this algorithm compares to some other one on a PDP-10 doesn't necessarily translate to modern machines.

[nerdponx]

I can't speak for other fields, but in statistics and machine learning, it's not uncommon to see at least some practical experiments or simulations alongside theoretical results, or at least some discussion of practical considerations.

There are definitely plenty of pure theory papers as well, and pure theory is still a contribution. However one would at least hope to see subsequent work that does focus on the practical aspect.