Web Tracing Framework by Google | Hacker News Reader

Web Tracing Framework by Google

google.github.io

180 pointsjustplay32 comments

Putting the project itself aside (which does seem quite useful), am I the only one who finds it intriguing the fact that Google is not using Google Code to host some of their recent open source projects?

Not really surprising. The goal of this project is to help developers make their web apps faster, not to make google code more popular. What's good for the web in general is good for Google and more important than the popularity of a product that doesn't make them much money anyway (google code).

I find it very positive.

Not really new. See also: https://github.com/google

That would have suggested dominance of bureaucracy in Google. Guidelines suggesting projects to be put on Google Code, etc. This seems more decentralized.

Usually the justifications these companies give for such mandates is how it would look to outsiders if they are not using their own tools.

On the other hand I remember reading about how Google has a corporate mandate that their employees cannot use Microsoft Windows without providing a business justification.

Is the next step mandating Chromebooks (unless an Apple machine is justifiable)?

AFAIK, the requirement is due to security concerns from the China hacks in 2010. The way Sergey Brin put it in 2011, it sounds like employees have the option. On the number of employees using Windows: "I’d probably guess 20 percent ... But I’d have to get back to you."

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/d2f3f04e-6ccf-11df-91c8-00144... http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/11/googlers-windows/

One would assume that since they develop Chrome for windows, they would have some number of devs using windows.

Yes, that would be "providing a business justification".

Google Code was a breakthrough in it's time (remember Sourceforge?).

Today if you want your open source project to be noticed, you pretty much have to push it to Github.

It would be great if there was a tool to push/pull projects from Google Code to Github that handled not just moving the code but migrating issues and wiki content all the other details that aren't straightforward but could be automated like creating a gh-pages site for the project, migrating downloads, notifying/adding project admins, emailing issue watchers, etc. Even better if Google and Github collaborated so that it could handle redirecting traffic.

I believe this is the general guidance for new projects- see https://github.com/polymer and https://github.com/dart-lang as well.

GitHub is just much better for collaboration.

How do people make those snazzy ascii diagrams (they're in a lot of github pages) like this: http://snag.gy/LqA7j.jpg

Page: http://google.github.io/tracing-framework/overview.html

My guess? Asciiflow (http://www.asciiflow.com)

Neat. If you want something similar offline there should be a couple emacs packages that do essentially the same thing (e.g. artist-mode).

I hate to ask what I think is probably a stupid question, but: how are they creating that animation? It's not a simple .gif, and it looks like they're using something akin to a sprite: http://google.github.io/tracing-framework/resources/anim_ind...

Edit: Looks like it's a modified version of Sublime's animation (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4532146).

Here's the repo with the modified version of the Sublime text animation engine: https://github.com/benvanik/anim_encoder

Great that it can support Chrome on Android for analysing mobile sites.

The HUD does not display/inject properly on our JS web app wunderlist. Wouldn't it make sense that the HUD controls existed outside the scope of the page's DOM? e.g. available in the [wtf] extension popover itself or as context menu items? Or as a dev tools tab?

I really want to test drive this! :)

Have you opened a bug and/or a feature request? I'm sure the team would love to hear that it isn't working for you (since that probably means it isn't working for someone else as well)

https://github.com/google/tracing-framework/issues

Looks similar to SpeedTracer...is it related at all? The replacement?

Good question. So, there's this new Web Tracing Framework:

http://google.github.io/tracing-framework/

And Speed Tracer, as you mention:

https://developers.google.com/web-toolkit/speedtracer/

And also PageSpeed Tools:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/

I'm surprised they don't address the distinction, history, or evolution plan anywhere prominently.

Also there is TraceGL which seems to be less about performance tuning and more about debugging and it's not free but looks like a great tool. https://trace.gl/

Web Tracing Framework a.k.a. WTF. Looks cool btw.

Very useful! Semi-related question: is there a way to profile the stack within a requestAnimationFrame callback? I seem to remember having access to it in earlier versions of chrome, but now I just see the callback and garbage collection events if present.

Best. Acronym. Ever.

I'm not sure, could get confused with the web template framework in WebKit.

https://github.com/WebKit/webkit/tree/master/Source/WTF/wtf

I'm so happy that I get to do mostly native apps. Building a good UI is hard enough without having to shoe-horn HTML into doing things it was never intended to do.

Yes, it sure is great that you never have to profile performance, trace call stacks, or find out where your heap is going in native app development.

Did people voting up this comment just not read the linked docs, or do you maybe not have the context to understand what this library does?

It instruments your code so you can get call stack traces with timing information associated. Unless your calls into the DOM are blocking, they aren't going to show up there (that's what the browser dev tools are for). There's a reason that the only HTML element explicitly mentioned in the docs is the canvas element. It even says, explicitly, "Though it's certainly useful to see the ways your application is interacting with the browser and vice versa, often there is much more work occurring within your call trees than not."

This has almost nothing to do with HTML. It's a profiling tool for a garbage-collected scripting language, and it looks more than a little useful.

For native front-ends most of that work has been done for me already though. I can't remember the last time I've had to worry about performance profiling or heap management in a native front-end - and we build iOS, Android and Windows apps that process huge amounts of (medical) data. Hell, I don't even have to make my own animations to have good looking apps because that's all built into the rich native components that I use.

On native platforms - if I stick to standard, well-known, stable components and if I follow good coding practices and recommended techniques - my apps are fast by default. And I'm just gluing things together most of the time. Easy, scrumptious pie! I can save the work of "squeezing every drop of performance out of my code" for back-end processes.

Things just work for the most part - unlike the web where half the sites that try to do something "fancy" like fixed elements just serve to make scrolling slow and clunky - hence the need for this tool.

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