Profiling versus Benchmarking

Dave Rolsky has an excellent post on Benchmarking veruss Profiling. His general point about the importance of profiling is dead on.

I do think benchmarking can be useful, if you’re doing it on a large enough hunk of code to give meaningful results — for instance, we did a lot of benchmarking on Rakudo’s spectest a few weeks ago, and ended up with a very nice speedup.

But I suspect we could have gotten even better results if we’d all been using a good Parrot profiler…