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I made a real-time C/C++/Rust build visualizer
- Surac 1y agobut why? I have to admit it's a fun project
- rvrb 1y agohere, I'll copy the first paragraph of TFA for you: > Many software projects take a long time to compile. Sometimes that’s just due to the sheer amount of code, like in the LLVM project. But often a build is slower than it should be for dumb, fixable reasons.
- bgirard 1y agoThat'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.
- dhooper 1y ago(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.
- bvisness 1y agoHello, I am the engineer in question. I am not actually super familiar with the details of the build system, but from when I saw, the main issues were: - Lots of constant-time slowness at the beginning and end of the build - Dubious parallelism, especially with unified builds - Cargo being Cargo Overall it mostly looks like a soup of `make` calls with no particular rhyme or reason. It's a far cry from the ninja example the OP showed in his post.
- epage 1y agoWhat `cargo being cargo` problems are you having?
- supportengineer 1y agoAmazing! Great job! What limits your tool to compiler/build tools, can it be used for any arbitrary process?
- dhooper 1y agoThank 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!
- DiddlyWinks 1y agoVideo encoding and 3-D rendering are a couple that come to mind; I'd think they'd launch quite a few. This looks like a really cool tool!
- shakna 1y agoJust as a random example in the area, I had a project where I transformed every frame in a video, using a custom binary, before encoding them back to the video. Hundreds of thousands of processes were normal.
- xuhu 1y agoIs 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 ?
- dhooper 1y agoOP 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.
- corysama 1y agoLooks like a general `fork()` visualizer to me. Which is great!
- ItsHarper 1y agoI like that the name reflects its broad usefulness
- Night_Thastus 1y agoI 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.
- unddoch 1y agoI wrote a little GCC plugin for compile time tracing/profiling, if that's something you're interested in: https://github.com/royjacobson/externis https://github.com/royjacobson/externis
- Night_Thastus 1y agoI just went ahead and tried it out :) I can get it to work for some sub-sets of our project, but for quite a bit of it I get the following error: cc1: error: cannot load plugin /opt/rh/gcc-toolset-13/root/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/13/plugin/externis.so: /opt/rh/gcc-toolset-13/root/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/13/plugin/externis.so: undefined symbol: _Z14decl_as_stringP9tree_nodei I suspect this is because these are C or Fortran sub-projects. I'm looking for some clean way to tell Cmake to apply externis to all the C++ only subprojects if possible. I'll see what I can come up with. I'd also like to know, if multiple GCC commands end up pointing to the same trace.json, especially in a parallel build, will externis automagically ensure that it doesn't step over itself?
- Night_Thastus 1y agoI figured out a way to set it at a top level, so it only happens with C++ files: target_compile_options(${NAME} PUBLIC $<$<COMPILE_LANGUAGE:CXX>:-fplugin=externis -fplugin-arg-externis-trace-dir=(where I want to put traces)> ) But as I suspected, it is not a single trace file. It's thousands of trace files. Is there some way to collate all the data into one larger picture of how the build progressed?
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- aanet 1y agoThis is fabulous!! Is there a version available for MacOS today?? I'd love to give it a whirl... For Rust, C++ / Swift and other stuff. Thanks!
- dhooper 1y agoI'll be sending out the a macOS version to another wave of beta users after I fix an outstanding issue, if you sign up (at bottom of article) and mention this comment I can make sure you're in that wave.
- aanet 1y agoThanks. Signed up
- Night_Thastus 1y agoIt looks like it doesn't have a public release for any OS yet, but has a way to enter for early access.
- mgaunard 1y agoThe real solution is to eliminate build systems where you have to define your own targets. Developers always get it wrong and do it badly.
- tiddles 1y agoNice, I’ve been looking for something like this for a while. I’ve noticed on my huge catkin cmake project that cmake is checking the existence of the same files hundreds of times too. Is there anything that can hook into fork() and provide a cached value after the first invocation?
- lights0123 1y agoMy tips for speeding up builds (from making this same project but with ebpf): - switch to ninja to avoid that exact issue since CMake + Make spawns a subprocess for every directory (use the binary from PyPi for jobserver integration) - catkin as in ROS? rm /opt/ros/noetic/etc/catkin/profile.d/99.roslisp.sh to remove 2 python spawns per package
- ethan_smith 1y agoYou could try ccache with the CCACHE_SLOPPINESS=file_stat_matches option, or implement a filesystem-level caching proxy like CachingFS or FUSE-based solutions that intercept and cache those redundant stat() calls.
- brcmthrowaway 1y agoWhat about OSes that dont use fork()?
- dhooper 1y agoI use whatever the equivalent is on that OS.
- klik99 1y agoNice! Leaving a comment to easily find this later, dont have anything to add except this looks cool
- boris 1y ago> It also has 6 seconds of inactivity before starting any useful work. For comparison, ninja takes 0.4 seconds to start compiling the 2,468,083 line llvm project. Ninja is not a 100% fair comparison to other tools, because it benefits from some “baked in” build logic by the tool that created the ninja file, but I think it’s a reasonable “speed of light” performance benchmark for build systems. This is an important observation that is often overlooked. What’s more, the changes to the information on which this “baked in” build logic is based is not tracked very precisely. How close can we get to this “speed of light” without such “baking in”? I ran a little benchmark (not 100% accurate for various reasons but good enough as a general indication) which builds the same project (Xerces-C++) both with ninja as configured by CMake and with build2, which doesn’t require a separate step and does configuration management as part of the build (and with precise change tracking). Ninja builds this project from scratch in 3.23s while build2 builds it in 3.54s. If we omit some of the steps done by CMake (like generating config.h) by not cleaning the corresponding files, then the time goes down to 3.28s. For reference, the CMake step takes 4.83s. So a fully from-scratch CMake+ninja build actually takes 8s, which is what you would normally pay if you were using this project as a dependency.
- remexre 1y ago> What’s more, the changes to the information on which this “baked in” build logic is based is not tracked very precisely. kbuild handles this on top of Make by having each target depend on a dummy file that gets updated when e.g. the CFLAGS change. It also treats Make a lot more like Ninja (e.g. avoiding putting the entire build graph into every Make process) -- I'd be interested to see how it compares.
- forrestthewoods 1y agoThis is great. I was skeptical from the title but the implementation is very clever. This could be a super super useful tool for the industry.
- kirito1337 1y agoThat's interesting.
- jeffbee 1y agoThis seems like a good place to integrate a Bazel Build Event Protocol stream consumer.
- MathMonkeyMan 1y agoI was going to comment that "what the fork" might not work for a client/server build system like Bazel, but now I have something to google instead.
- CyberDildonics 1y agoI 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.
- dhooper 1y agoThanks CyberDildoNics!
- 1718627440 1y agoI'm interested to try, but don't get what that early access signup is about. Where is the email address going to show up? Can I use a temp mail?
- dhooper 1y agoI used the term "early access" when I should've used "private beta". The sign up is just for me to have an email addresses to send the private beta when the next update goes out, and I'll follow up for feedback. Nothing sinister is happening.
- 1718627440 1y ago> to send the private beta when the next update goes out Meaning I only can try the software after sign up, or did I miss the obvious repo link? What language is this project written in, what build system does it use itself? I just don't feel comfortable pasting my email address into a Google site. I can use a temp mail, but I will loose access to it in a few minutes/hours, so I don't know if that would annoy you. What kind of times do you expect in the form, serial or parallel build time? What kind of file do you want to be modified. When I modify main.c, basically nothing gets rebuild, when I modify the central header file, it will be like a total rebuild. Can you clarify that in the form?
- entelechy 1y agoLove it! We did something similar using strace/dtruss back in 2018 with https://buildinfer.loopperfect.com/ 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/ 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.
- flakes 1y agoCurious, what were you using for doing syscall logging? LD_PRELOAD tricks, or ebpf filtering?
- entelechy 1y agomostly strace and it's macos equivalent; Later we moved to ptrace and ebpf. LD_PRELOAD unfortunately doesn't work for statically linked libc. There are also kernel probes but didn't like that it required root permissions...
- proctorg76 1y agothe parallels between tech and manufacturing never cease to amaze, this looks so much like the machine monitoring / execution system we use in the car parts plant I want to ask if you've calculated the TEEP and OEE of your build farm
- Cloudef 1y agoLLVM is taking its sweet time, brew coffee
- mrlonglong 1y agoDoes it work with cmake?
- MBCook 1y agoThere is an example cmake graph in the article.
- mrlonglong 1y agoThanks.
- ItsHarper 1y agoA CMake build is used as an example in the blog post. It's literally just visualizing all spawned processes, so it will work for anything that spawns subprocesses to do the build.
- tom_ 1y agoIf you use the Visual C++ compiler on Windows, vcperf is worth a look: https://github.com/microsoft/vcperf 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.
- muststopmyths 1y agoAlso Incredibuild. The free version is probably good enough to visualize your build and see any bottlenecks.
- metalliqaz 1y agoIsn't `wtf` already a fairly common command?
- audiofish 1y agoReally cool tool, but perhaps not for the original use-case. I often find myself trying to figure out what call tree a large Bash script creates, and this looks like it visualises it well. This would have been really useful 6 months ago, when I was trying to figure out what on earth some Jetson tools actually did to build and flash an OS image.
- Mawr 1y agoSuggestion to the blog author - put: > Here it is recording the build of a macOS app: > <gif> At the top of the page, it should be right under the header. You made a thing, so show the thing. You can waffle on about it later. Just show the thing.
- epage 1y agoHow does this compare to `cargo check --timings`? It visualizes each crate's build, shows the dependencies between them, shows when the initial compilation is done that unblocks dependents, and soon will have link information.
- rustystump 1y ago10/10 this is very cool and the kind of hacking i come here for
- time4tea 1y agoThen I hid it away. This is an ad not a helpful announcement.
- JackYoustra 1y agoFor anyone using xcode: there's a builtin button to show a visualization for a build (not realtime afaik) for it too.
- bdash 1y agoI've had success using https://github.com/nico/ninjatracing https://github.com/nico/ninjatracing along with Clang's `-ftime-trace` to visualize the build performance of a C++ project using CMake. https://github.com/aras-p/ClangBuildAnalyzer https://github.com/aras-p/ClangBuildAnalyzer helps further break down what the compiler is spending its time on.
- bitbasher 1y agoThis is cool, but for Rust you have `cargo build --timings` built in and has even more details.
- saagarjha 1y agoI've done something similar by running Instruments during the build, which not only tells me which processes are running when but also what they're doing. Unfortunately Instruments gets upset if your build takes a long time, and it doesn't really allow filtering by process tree, but it helped shipped several major wins for our builds when I was working on Twitter's iOS codebase. Alas trying to this these days will not work because Instrument's "All Processes" tracing has been broken for a while (FB14533747).
- tempodox 1y agoI would be interested and even pay for it, but I am not a joiner. And I don't want Google to know any of my email addresses.
- lsuresh 1y agoWould love to have our team try this out (we have some ridiculous rust builds).
- pjmlp 1y agoGreat piece of work. Without trying to devalue it, note that VS and XCode have similar visualization tools.
- torarnv 1y agoAwesome!! Are you planning to open source this? I’ve been working on something similar and would love to join forces!
- emigre 1y agoReally nice and interesting! Thanks!
- terabytest 1y agoIt looks really nice. I wonder if it’d be possible to break it down even further by somehow instrumenting the actual processes and including their execution flame graphs as part of the chart. That would expose a ton of extra information about the large gaps of “inactivity”.
- secondcoming 1y agoThis looks awesome. I've used clang's -ftime-trace option in the past and that's also really good. It's a pity gcc has nothing similar.