tracing is better than logging · riki's house

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information about time spans is very valuable for profiling
2023-10-03
and you do not have to worry about “should I log before I start the operation, or after I end the operation?”
2023-10-03
additionally, traces made of spans are way easier to visualize than tonnes of logs
2023-10-03
- if you’ve never tried Perfetto or similar tools, I highly recommend giving it a shot
  2023-10-03
I also imagine visualizing traces live in your CLI could yield a very nice user experience, with a visible progress indicator as to what eg. your compiler is working on right now at a glance, reassuring you that it is not stuck on some while (true) {} in constant evaluation
2023-10-03
- perhaps emitting warnings along the road for things that take alarmingly long, so that you can keep your build times in check
  2023-10-03
- though printing to stdout is quite slow, so perhaps limiting the frequency or depth would be a worthwhile thing to do
  2023-10-03