samtiffin/prettybench

Format Go's benchmarking output

Prettybench

A tool for transforming go test's benchmark output a bit to make it nicer for humans.

Problem

Go benchmarks are great, particularly when used in concert with benchcmp. But the output can be a bit hard to read:

Solution

$ go get github.com/cespare/prettybench
$ go test -bench=. | prettybench

• Column headers
• Columns are aligned
• Time output is adjusted to convenient units

Notes

• Right now the units for the time are chosen based on the smallest value in the column.

• Prettybench has to buffer all the rows of output before it can print them (for column formatting), so you won't see intermediate progress. If you want to see that too, you could tee your output so that you see the unmodified version as well. If you do this, you'll want to use the prettybench's -no-passthrough flag so it doesn't print all the other lines (because then they'd be printed twice):

    $ go test -bench=. | tee >(prettybench -no-passthrough)
  

To Do (maybe)

• Handle benchcmp output
• Change the units for non-time columns as well (these are generally OK though).