HTML 5 Profiler #3

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It’s been a few hectic weeks here at GarageGames and I haven’t been able to work on my Innovation Friday project nearly as much as I had hoped (at least on Friday). So for me, I’ve been innovating more on weeknights after 9pm then I have been on Fridays. But the good news is that I am making progress. Here’s an update:

I’ve used Javascript before, but never to do anything complicated. I’m surprised how long it took me to figure out how to implement inheritance. A lot of the documentation I found online was misleading. It’s not a blocker to work with Javascript, but it’s not necessarily intuitive for someone who’s been writing C++ for over 17 years.

I’ve built a framework for testing performance. My core objects are Core and Stat Block.

Core provides the base functionality for performance tests. I’ve implemented one test which is basically an example test. Core starts timing before the main function and ends it after the test finishes.

Javascript’s timer is low resolution and I’m guessing the variance is somewhere around 1 to 10 milliseconds which isn’t a big deal for a web page, but way too coarse grained for accurate timing. So in order to time tests, they are going to need to iterate many times to account for the errors of an inaccurate timer.

Currently, I’ve implemented two different iterations, once that occurs within the test and one that runs the test multiple times. The first iteration (the inner iteration) accounts for the low accuracy of the timer, the second iteration (the outer iteration) accounts for performance inconsistences that can occur. These iterations feed the stat block.

The stat block records information about a set of tests. Currently, I’m collecting the mean, max, min, and std deviation of each set of tests. We divide the total time by the inner iteration count to get the approximate timing of one iteration.

I’ve done some very basic UI work and I’m planning to do enough to make the test application functional. It won’t be pretty . I will be away on travel next Friday, so hopefully I’ll get the chance to work on this project some more while I travel. I’m really close to being able to put this on GitHub so that I can share it with others.

Next steps are: 1) Finish functional UI 2) Write some documentation on how to make a good test 3) Post it on GitHub