BenchIt: A Micro-Benchmarking Tool for VSCode
BenchIt is a Visual Studio Code extension designed to make micro-benchmarking JavaScript functions effortless. It provides real-time performance tracking, automatic updates on code changes, and visualization of benchmarking results—all within VSCode.
I found that accurately benchmarking an algorithm is actually quite hard for these reasons:
- A local machine always has background processes going on (even when running on another thread)
- Javascript's JIT (Just in time) compiler actually does quite a lot of optimisations, things that you need to rollback in order to gain an accurate picture of the actual algorithm.
Key features include:
- Benchmarking on a seperate thread, doesn't slow you down!
- Example-based parameter declarations – easily define test cases.
- Dynamic benchmarking – supports scaling input sizes to observe performance shifts of your algorithm as sizes change differ
- Recursive function support – benchmark nested functions.
Developed using Svelte, BenchIt integrates into VSCode, offering an intuitive way to measure execution speed. Still In pre-release, it aims to refine benchmarking workflows for developers.
In order to get to V1 I would need to get back to solving these problems:
- Typescript support
- Node Module support