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I made a real-time C/C++/Rust build visualizer

danielchasehooper.com

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Re: I made a real-time C/C++/Rust build visualizer

#31

Post by entelechy »

Love it! We did something similar using strace/dtruss back in 2018 with https://buildinfer.loopperfect.com/ and were generating graphs (using eg. graphviz and perfetto.dev) and BUCK files on the back of that

Whilst we regrettably never came around to package it as a propper product, we found it immensly valuable in our consulting work, to pinpoint issues and aid the conversion to BUCK/Bazel. We used graphviz, https://perfetto.dev/ and couple other tools to visualise things

Recently we cicled back to this too but with a broader usecase in mind.

There are some inherent technical challanges with this approach & domain:

- syscall logs can get huge - especially when saved to disk. Our strace logs would get over 100GB for some projects (llvm was around ~50GB)

- some projects also use https and inter process communications and that needs ot be properly handled too. (We even had a customer that was retriving code from a firebird database via perl as part of the compilation step!)

- It's runtime analysis - you might need to repeat the analysis for each configuration.

Re: I made a real-time C/C++/Rust build visualizer

#32

Post by dhooper »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #29

I love the visualization, I think it's great information and will be very helpful to whoever uses it. I would think about a different name. Often names are either meant to be funny or just unique nonsense but something short and elegantly descriptive (like BuildViz etc.) can go a long way to making it seem more legitimate and being more widely used.

Thanks CyberDildoNics!

Re: I made a real-time C/C++/Rust build visualizer

#33

Post by hiccuphippo »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #29

I love the visualization, I think it's great information and will be very helpful to whoever uses it. I would think about a different name. Often names are either meant to be funny or just unique nonsense but something short and elegantly descriptive (like BuildViz etc.) can go a long way to making it seem more legitimate and being more widely used.

Name checks out.

Re: I made a real-time C/C++/Rust build visualizer

#34

Post by phaedrus »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #10

I am extremely interested in this. I am stuck in an environment with CMake, GCC and Unix Make (no clang, no ninja) and getting detailed information about WHY the build is taking so long is nearly impossible. It's also a bit of a messy build with steps like copying a bunch of files from the source into the build folder. Multiple languages (C, C++, Fortran, Python), custom cmake steps, etc. If this tool can handle that…

When I was trying to improve compile time for my game engine, I ended up using compiled size as a proxy measure. Although it is an imperfect correlation, the fact that compiled size is deterministic across build runs and even across builds on different machines makes it easier to work with than wall clock time.

Re: I made a real-time C/C++/Rust build visualizer

#35

Post by pklausler »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #10

I am extremely interested in this. I am stuck in an environment with CMake, GCC and Unix Make (no clang, no ninja) and getting detailed information about WHY the build is taking so long is nearly impossible. It's also a bit of a messy build with steps like copying a bunch of files from the source into the build folder. Multiple languages (C, C++, Fortran, Python), custom cmake steps, etc. If this tool can handle that…

strace might help, if you have it.

Re: I made a real-time C/C++/Rust build visualizer

#39

Post by tom_ »

If you use the Visual C++ compiler on Windows, vcperf is worth a look: https://github.com/microsoft/vcperf - comes with VS2022, or you can build from github.

I've used it with projects generated by UBT and CMake. I can't remember if it provides any info that'd let you assess the quality of build parallelism, but it does have some compiler front end info which is pretty straightforward to read. Particularly expensive headers (whether inherently so, or just because they're included a lot) are easy to find.

Re: I made a real-time C/C++/Rust build visualizer

#40

Post by mlsu »

phaedrus wrote: post #34
Night_Thastus wrote: post #10

I am extremely interested in this. I am stuck in an environment with CMake, GCC and Unix Make (no clang, no ninja) and getting detailed information about WHY the build is taking so long is nearly impossible. It's also a bit of a messy build with steps like copying a bunch of files from the source into the build folder. Multiple languages (C, C++, Fortran, Python), custom cmake steps, etc. If this tool can handle that…

When I was trying to improve compile time for my game engine, I ended up using compiled size as a proxy measure. Although it is an imperfect correlation, the fact that compiled size is deterministic across build runs and even across builds on different machines makes it easier to work with than wall clock time.

Wait, this is not intuitive at all for me.

If the compiler is working harder wouldn't that result in a more compact binary? Maybe I'm thinking too much from an embedded software POV.

I suppose the compiler does eventually do IO but IO isn't really the constraint most of the time right?

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