No, we didn't cheat in the benchmark. At least I hope we didn't. Every optimization in this story was gated on bit identical output checksums against HotSpot, and the harness refuses to print a ratio when a checksum differs.
Source: [Dev.to](https://dev.to/codenameone/how-we-beat-hotspot-performance-by-cheating-but-not-like-that-2187)