3 comments

  • t43562 6 minutes ago
    It's like Electric Insight, which was a fantastic if proprietary tool.

    There's an enormous amount of analysis you can do with tools like this from estimating how much faster the build would be with more cores (i.e. is it worth adding more) to things like a diff of one build against another: why is one build bad and the other good - what differed?

  • anaqin 50 minutes ago
    Good write up! I was hoping it was going to conclude with the author getting buns zig build way faster than Rusts but a good deep dive nevertheless
    • lalitmaganti 25 minutes ago
      Having spent ~3 weeks of evenings and weekends on this, I was a bit burned out to keep trying to optimize especially because all of this code is just a dead end anyway...

      The fix seemed to be to split up Bun's Zig module into ~100 pieces just like they've done on Rust but how representative that would have been on anything Bun might of shipped is very much in question!

      • rahkiin 13 minutes ago
        Can you force a non-parallel build of those rust crates to make the comparison fairer?
  • flimflamm 34 minutes ago
    It would be interesting to see what would be good input for LLMs to do the optimizations / trials on that automatically. Is the visual representation best or something else?
    • Conlectus 23 minutes ago
      This is just how hacker news is now, huh?

      “I did this cool useful thing”

      “Great! Please describe how I can get a machine to replace you.”

    • lalitmaganti 32 minutes ago
      It's actually trivially easy to add a "automated report" feature to buildprof due to its architecture (just a few SQL queries on top of Perfetto's trace processor). And I'm sure AI could hill climb the build time based on this.

      But I still think the visual view is invaluable for human understanding and for the "why is this even happening" problems which I think AI is still bad at seeing.