I write a benchmark

Today I need to write a benchmark.

I have decided to reimplement HTML Tidy in a simple, approximate way. I chose this because:

• I don't know anything about how it works internally
• … but I haven't heard that it's especially terrible
• I have a suitable library, one called Jsoup
• Jsoup is written in typical java style
• Using jsoup requires little code

Of course I realise that this won't be a very good as a benchmark. I chose it because I believe that Jsoup is the kind of code I need to handle well. If my code doesn't do well on Jsoup, then I need to fix it. I don't have the same feeling about specint and other well-known benchmarks. They try to be good, precise benchmarks, and they don't explicitly try to be typical java.

As a result this benchmark will be useful for me, and the cost of that is that its measured performance is imprecise for you.