On: Grinch about the array.length caching

[mraleph]

Thanks! You are absolutely correct in summarizing two underlying themes for my microbenchmarking related posts: (a) one needs to understand what one is measuring (b) one needs to understand if that actually matters for their project.

> Currently, I find the external tools for doing this hard enough to set up

I have tried making this kind of information easier to grok for JavaScript developers by creating IRHydra[1]. Please reach out and describe your issues - one of the reasons why something like IRHydra is not part of Dev Tools yet is that Dev Tools people are not registering big demand for indepth analysis tools.

[1] http://mrale.ph/irhydra/2

[jwmerrill → mraleph]

IRHydra is awesome, but there is still a lot more friction to using it compared to the built in dev tools. You have to run v8 with special flags and upload files to a web page. In some ways, this is still quite simple compared to getting rolling with debugger/disassembler tools for many other languages/environments.

But imagine a workflow where I'm profiling my real application in the browser, and I see that some function comes up hot. If I could just click its name and get this kind of information, I believe I would do this kind of analysis much more often.

That said, as a person who makes websites, I'm sensitive to the fact that people who claim they would use a feature if you built it won't actually always use the feature when you build it...

[mraleph → jwmerrill]

I totally agree with you! I would love to have equivalent functionality built right into Dev Tools. Immediacy is a very important aspect of usability - I would like to inspect a running program without any special movements.

> upload files to a web page.

Minor clarification: nothing ever leaves your local computer. There is no server component in IRHydra. It's purely your browser that interprets these files.

[jwmerrill → mraleph]

> nothing ever leaves your local computer. There is no server component in IRHydra.

Wow, cool!