I made a build visualizer to understand Bun's compile times
19 points by lalitmaganti 5 hours ago | 7 comments
t43562 6 minutes ago
It's like Electric Insight, which was a fantastic if proprietary tool.
replyanaqin 50 minutes ago
Good write up! I was hoping it was going to conclude with the author getting buns zig build way faster than Rusts but a good deep dive nevertheless
replylalitmaganti 25 minutes ago
Having spent ~3 weeks of evenings and weekends on this, I was a bit burned out to keep trying to optimize especially because all of this code is just a dead end anyway...
replyThe fix seemed to be to split up Bun's Zig module into ~100 pieces just like they've done on Rust but how representative that would have been on anything Bun might of shipped is very much in question!
flimflamm 34 minutes ago
It would be interesting to see what would be good input for LLMs to do the optimizations / trials on that automatically. Is the visual representation best or something else?
replyConlectus 23 minutes ago
This is just how hacker news is now, huh?
reply“I did this cool useful thing”
“Great! Please describe how I can get a machine to replace you.”
lalitmaganti 32 minutes ago
It's actually trivially easy to add a "automated report" feature to buildprof due to its architecture (just a few SQL queries on top of Perfetto's trace processor). And I'm sure AI could hill climb the build time based on this.
replyBut I still think the visual view is invaluable for human understanding and for the "why is this even happening" problems which I think AI is still bad at seeing.