CompileScore

VisualStudio extension and utilities used to display and highlight compilation profiling data. Know the real compilation cost of your code directly inside Visual Studio. Keep the compile times in check.

Motivation

Compile times are one of the most important things that affect productivity and iterations while developing in C/C++. Slow compile times can be very frustrating, as they are usual case scenarios in big code productions. Being able to identify which pieces are expensive in the same place you code is key in order to keep tech debt under control.

Features

Build and Profile

Text Highlight on include costs

Tool window with full project aggregated data

Detailed Timeline Graph for each translation unit

Double-click any entry in the compile score window to open its timeline.

Includers Graph

This window shows all the inclusion stacks that lead to the selected include, ending with the compilation units.

Right-click on any include entry and select Show Includers Graph to open its includers graph.

Navigation controls:

Zoom: Control + Mouse Wheel
Scroll: Middle mouse press and drag

Standalone App

This repository also contains a standalone app with the same visualization and code as the VS extension. It can prove useful to compare results or open reports without having to open Visual Studio.

The app needs to be build. The project is inside the same solution as the VS extensions and it can be found at CompileScore/CompileScore.sln.

How it works

The main idea is to get the C++ compiler to output a trace for what happened during the build. We can then aggregate all that data using the Data Extractor in this repository, and consume it with the VS plugin or the standalone app.

The data extraction is an independent process in order to allow things like building the score file on a build server and consume it remotely. This can be useful in big codebases where we want the production floor to just use the reports from last night inside VS without having to profile locally.

In the VS extension options there is a field to tell the plugin where to find the report file (this is next to the solution file or root folder by default).

For more information check the Score Generation Page.

Documentation

Building the Project

The Release workflow action contains a step by step process for building the Data Extractor, the VISX and the Standalone App.

Several Test Projects have been included in the repository.

References

Visual Studio
Clang 9+ ( support for -ftime-trace )
Microsoft C++ Build Insights SDK ( MSVC 16.1 or higher )

If you're not using Visual Studio but are still interested in the data aggregation, you can use SeeProfiler, a standalone C++ compiler profiler which aggregates all the exported data from clang for a global view.

Contributing

This project is open to code contributions.

If you found this extension useful you can always buy me a cup coffee.

Viladoman/CompileScore

Viladoman

Reviews

Repository Details