"Those are toy scores and one should not take them seriously."

People keep saying that about The Shootout, but I don't think so. They reflect the combination of two qualities: the main implementation of the language, and the community around the language. It's way too cynical to say that the results cannot be taken seriously -- they just have to be taken carefully.

For instance, we can see that the Rust community was able to make their runs quite snappy quite easily, even though the implementation isn't even ready yet. That's impressive!