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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

#2

Post by bgirard »

That's really cool. Fascinating to think about all the problems that get missed due to poor or missing visualizations like this.

I did a lot of work to improve the Mozilla build system a decade ago where I would have loved this tool. Wish they would have said what problem they found.

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

#3

Post by xuhu »

Is there a tool that records the timestamp of each executed command during a build, and when you rebuild, it tells you how much time is left instead of "building obj 35 out of 1023" ?

Or (for cmake or ninja) use a CSV that says how long each object takes to build and use it to estimate how much is left ?

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

#4

Post by dhooper »

bgirard wrote: post #2

That's really cool. Fascinating to think about all the problems that get missed due to poor or missing visualizations like this. I did a lot of work to improve the Mozilla build system a decade ago where I would have loved this tool. Wish they would have said what problem they found.

(OP here) Thanks!

My call with the Mozilla engineer was cut short, so we didn't have time to go into detail about what he found, I want to look into it myself.

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

#6

Post by dhooper »

xuhu wrote: post #3

Is there a tool that records the timestamp of each executed command during a build, and when you rebuild, it tells you how much time is left instead of "building obj 35 out of 1023" ? Or (for cmake or ninja) use a CSV that says how long each object takes to build and use it to estimate how much is left ?

OP Here. Thats an interesting idea. What The Fork knows all the commands run, and every path they read/write, so I should be able to make it estimate build time just by looking at what files were touched.

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

#9

Post by dhooper »

supportengineer wrote: post #8

Amazing! Great job! What limits your tool to compiler/build tools, can it be used for any arbitrary process?

Thank you! Yeah it can be used for any type of program, but I haven't been able to think of anything besides compilation that creates enough processes to be interesting. I'm open to ideas!

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

#10

Post by Night_Thastus »

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 kind of mess, I'll be very interested to see what I can learn.

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