Feature/improvement brainstorming

[ivoanjo]

I've spent some time thinking about potential improvements to gvl-tracing, and decided to record it here. If anyone's interested in tackling them, feel free to ask for details!

• (Medium) Create a wrapper command to run some other Ruby command with gvl-tracing:

  $ bundle exec gvl-tracing ruby some-example.rb

• (Medium) Add support for producing data in a format readable by the Firefox Profiler or Speedscope. Both provide interesting alternatives to perfetto and seem to be easier to integrate/share data with.

  Apparently Firefox Profiler is supposed to be able to read the perfetto format, but I can't get it to open the gvl-tracing output. Maybe there's some subtle detail that it doesn't like?

  Update: Early prototype in Fix perfetto output for using in ff profiler #16 :)

• (Easy) Add tests! Because I built this gem as an experiment over a few nights and weekends, it was small enough that I could get away without a test suite. I would mega appreciate if someone helped change that :)

[benoittgt]

For the test do you have something in mind? I thought about something simple base on examples folder + partial match of the output. More like integration testing.

Love this menu.

[ivoanjo]

Yes, I was thinking along those lines of having small code blocks to try to exercise the gem with something that produces only a few events, and then parse the output and see if it looks reasonable.

[benoittgt]

Also another idea, will be to script the examples generation + json compacting.

[ivoanjo]

Also another idea, will be to script the examples generation + json compacting.

+1 Yeah, that would be cool as indeed right now whenever we change something the examples can become outdated.

[ivoanjo]

Updated list of tasks now that #12 and #14 fix some of them :)

[ivoanjo]

Added reference to ruby/ruby#8885 since we can use it to solve the thread reuse issue :)

[jpcamara]

Hi there 🙋🏻‍♂️! I'll be submitting some PRs to:

• Add some specs
• Attempt Firefox profiler support (it's a little tricky but I do have it loading in the profiler)
• Fix Ruby 3.3 support - because the parent thread can fire the events now, getting the current thread id causes the timeline to show the Main thread as starting multiple times and the other threads never show as starting

Should have at least the specs up in the next day or so.

[ivoanjo]

THAT IS AMAZING AND I CAN'T WAIT!

I'll add the caveat that I moved houses the past weekend and I may take a bit to review stuff, but I definitely want to :)

[jpcamara]

THAT IS AMAZING AND I CAN'T WAIT!

I'll add the caveat that I moved houses the past weekend and I may take a bit to review stuff, but I definitely want to :)

Haha understandable! I'm sure it'll take me a bit to get everything through anyways. Good luck with the post-move tasks 🫡

[jpcamara]

First PR for specs, including a bug fix for the block form of start: #15 🎉. It only covers Ruby 3.2 atm, Ruby 3.3 will be upcoming.