Show HN: Spall – WASM-based profiler for JavaScript and C in ~5k lines of Odin

Re:Show HN: Spall – WASM-based profiler for JavaScript and C... by qgc on Monday January 02, 2023 @10:58AM (#34219293)

The comparison with Perfetto in the video is pretty damn impressive. So nice to have another player in the profiler space. Iteration time is unfortunately (and inexplicably) undervalued. My short time messing around with SpeedScope was more promising, but profiling in general has been pretty painful with all of the tools I've tried that ingest auto-traced input.

You mention in the "For Everyone Else" section that you have an auto-tracer system to instrument all your tracing. Aside from being very handy, how does it compare to [1] which you mention right after?

[1] https://github.com/bvisness/dtrace2spall

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Re:Show HN: Spall – WASM-based profiler for JavaScript and C... by crdavidson on Monday January 02, 2023 @11:11AM (#34219507)

So, dtrace2spall is going to generate much smaller files and impact runtime less, because it samples with dtrace, and then converts the data to spall's format as a post-pass.

Auto-tracing is far more comprehensive, but it's a big datadump, and it does impact runtimes a bit more.

So far I've mostly used auto-tracing to figure out how bigger pieces of code work, rather than strictly for profiling. It was super helpful trying to walk through the more complicated parts of the Odin compiler to fix things, being able to see the order of functions called on the timeline.

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