Display benchmark progress #209
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This change emits a string to `stderr` that indicates how far Sightglass has come in running its benchmarks: ``` Iterations completed: 42/100 ``` The idea is to provide more immediate and clear feedback than `RUST_LOG` that Sightglass is doing work and the user can wait for it to finish. This turns out to be rather tricky to do due to the single-process and multi-process paradigms for running benchmarks; the solution is to communicate here with an internal environment variable "protocol." The other tricky bit is the addition of ANSI terminal escape codes. This allows Sightglass to overwrite the same line and avoid filling up a screen with repeated `Iterations completed: ...` messages. This part of the PR could be safely removed without change to the counting functionality but I hope that the implementation is simple enough--and pessimistic enough--that it should not cause trouble down the road. I say "pessimistic" because the heuristic for determining if a terminal can support these "overwriting" terminal codes should just default to printing extra lines if anything looks amiss. This PR is related to bytecodealliance#203 and may close that issue.
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cc: @cfallin, @jlb6740, @jameysharp. |
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This is... a lot of code for printing some bits to stderr to show that something is actually happening. Especially when we start interacting with RUST_LOG and all that. I've also found tty detection to be fairly flaky in the past (e.g. doesn't work properly with terminals inside other tools, like Emacs). The communication between parent and child processes, etc.
Also: do the terminal escape codes work on windows too?
I feel like we can get 95% of the benefit with 1% of the code if we just do
eprintln!(".");in the execute_in_multiple_processes function's loop after spawning each child process. This would give us a . after every process completes, which is 10 iterations by default. That seems to satisfy the "I can't tell if it is doing anything" use case just fine by me. If we really want more information, we could print Process N/M complete. or something like that. But we really don't need all the bells and whistles just to get some feedback...
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Opened #211 as an alternative approach |
This change emits a string to
stderrthat indicates how far Sightglass has come in running its benchmarks:The idea is to provide more immediate and clear feedback than
RUST_LOGthat Sightglass is doing work and the user can wait for it to finish. This turns out to be rather tricky to do due to the single-process and multi-process paradigms for running benchmarks; the solution is to communicate here with an internal environment variable "protocol."The other tricky bit is the addition of ANSI terminal escape codes. This allows Sightglass to overwrite the same line and avoid filling up a screen with repeated
Iterations completed: ...messages. This part of the PR could be safely removed without change to the counting functionality but I hope that the implementation is simple enough--and pessimistic enough--that it should not cause trouble down the road. I say "pessimistic" because the heuristic for determining if a terminal can support these "overwriting" terminal codes should just default to printing extra lines if anything looks amiss.This PR is related to #203 and may close that issue.