Poop: Performance Optimizer Observation Platform

Sometimes you just need to check Poop to make sure your apps still healthy.

Causal profiling still uses hypothesis testing, so I don't get your point. Ultimately, one needs to know if software A is 'better' or 'worse' than software A' for any given definition of those terms.

Coz appears to use a very good method for profiling multi-threaded applications, but which seems to be not applicable to single-threaded applications and I do not see how it would help to avoid the variability caused by different memory layouts, which, as you rightly point out, may confound profiling results.

What a great talk.

I've been working on algorithm benchmarking software, and I observed that small changes to algorithm code, even in parts that would not execute, would have a large effect on execution speed.

Even better they seem to have a solution to the problem. Going to explore further to see how we can use this technique.

Even with the context, this comment sounded so intriguing and wrong at the same time that I hesitated while opening the link.

Watched a few mins and bookmarked it for another day. There were many other name suggestions that are good but I'm glad you kept the initial name.

Does this need a [NSFW] tag?

I know how to make poop, bro. Been doing it for a long time now.

Kindof off-topic, but has anyone had any success in using perf_event_open from within WSL, or is that unsupported? I tried `sysctl kernel.perf_event_paranoid=0` and the following, which works under "real" linux, but fails under WSL:

    struct perf_event_attr attr = {
        .type = PERF_TYPE_HARDWARE,
        .size = sizeof(struct perf_event_attr),
        .config = PERF_COUNT_HW_INSTRUCTIONS,
        .disabled = 1, /* only need to read once, not updating values, but fails with 0 also */
        .exclude_kernel = 1,
        .exclude_hv = 1
    };
    int fd = perf_event_open(&attr, 0, -1, -1, 0); /* fails, returns -1 */

Microsoft's kernel appears to have the right CONFIG_* as well, so I feel like it must be supported in some capacity, even if limited.

how young? I'm having a hard time containing my inner 5 year old. Apparently he has a poopulence of jokes ready for the making.

A company refusing to use the most appropriate tool because of the name is much more offensive to me than a tool with a childish name.

Slim chance that it really gains wider adoption and becomes a standard tool but it will be an interesting conversation starter for sure.

Imagine you are struggling with performance of some tool and a more knowledgeable senior comes in and says "you need to use poop" or "just poop it!".

Such a cool project. Essentially a collection of custom HTTP clients for every supported web site.

They've apparently renamed to Woob: https://woob.tech/

> Woob (Web Outside of Browsers) is a library which provides a Python standardized API and data models to access websites.

Interesting idea -- basically an API on top of a passel of site-specific web scraper modules.

The name poop does not hold in the intercultural sense. Indeed, in northern dutch poep means shit. In southern dutch poepen means having sexual intercourse.

Fun fact: the platform is built using zig, which means poop in Arabic.

It's just not working, I `poop`ed all day long!

Out of curiosity, what makes it unreadable to you?

This might be more of an indictment on 'readable' being a meaningful concept (beyond simple personal preference) than it is of Zig's syntax.

I've never touched zig and know next to nothing about it, but that all looks reasonable to me at a glance. What exaxtly do you find so bad?

I've never used Zig or C++, mostly Bash, Python, and Lisps, but have recently began learning C. I see C++ in search results, and it looks like C with higher level features in a register that reminds me of Java. I see this, and it looks similer: C with higher level features that remind me more of Python. I'm sure it's got other important features and priorities that set it apart (oft' discussed here), but that's what I see, and I dig it.

To be clear there are definitely a few ideoms I'd need to learn before considering this readable (it ain't psudocode), but I generally see all the building blocks and recognize what they're achiving. Maybe I'd have put them together slightly differently, but that could be equally true in Python. I'd rather learn this next than C++.

The density of how it's been written reminds me of some lisp code I've read, some implementations of state machines can be hard to follow too (in the classic "but where does it do the thing?" sense). I attribute a lot of the stuff that I don't follow to the lower-level C influence; I'm working for the first time with memory managment, structs, static types, pointers, bitwise opperations, etc.

Think I made my point in there somewhere >z>

Would love to know where you're coming at it from, I'd imagine that the C or 'kinda functional control flow' aspects might explain what looks most forign to you too (unless you have broader experience with low level languages)?

Looks fine to me. Syntax is the run-of-the-mill post-Java style currently favored, as exemplified by e.g. Haskell or Rust. Not a fan personally, but this is what is popular now, so that's what we have to live with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Style-wise, looks fine. Code split up into functions where it makes sense, inlined where it doesn't. I've seen worse - for example, code that takes the equivalent of that, and splits it into 100 functions across 10+ files.