[Haskell-cafe] Benchmarking using instruction counting

[Alexey Khudyakov]

Hello!

I want to announce new benchmarking framework tasty-papi[1,2]
Unlike criterion, gauge or tasty-bench is uses instruction
counting instead of time measurements. It should be affected
by OS scheduler much less so it should be possible to run
benchmarks on CI. Although not on github CI (not enough
permissions)

For measurements papi[3] is used. So all hardware and OS
limitations are inherited from there. At least it works on linux
Here is example output:

 > 6:                OK (0.02s)
 >  ALLOC=528  TOT_INS=3609  TOT_CYC=4981  BR_INS=907  BR_MSP=58
 > 7:                OK
 >  ALLOC=864  TOT_INS=5518  TOT_CYC=5138  BR_INS=1378 BR_MSP=50
 > 8:                OK
 >  ALLOC=1408 TOT_INS=8614  TOT_CYC=6515  BR_INS=2142 BR_MSP=63

For each benchmark we measure number of allocated bytes, number of 
instructions and cycles spent as well as number of branching 
instructions and branch mispredictions. Counter set could be adjusted 
using command line flags.

This library hasn't seen much real world use. So treat measurement with 
care.

[1] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/tasty-papi
[2] https://github.com/Shimuuar/tasty-papi
[3] https://icl.utk.edu/papi/

  - Alexey