Bench: a simpler benchmark module

There was a post in blogs.perl.org or Planet Perl Iron Man (sorry, forgot the exact article) that said something along the line of: "Benchmark is a fine module, but for simplicity I'll use the time command". Which immediately hit home with me, because I too very seldomly use Benchmark. I guess the problem is I almost always have to perldoc it before using it, and there are quite some extra characters to type.

So last weekend I wrote Bench (repo) that's hopefully simpler enough to get used more.

To benchmark your program, just type: perl -MBench yourscript.pl. Sample output:

$ perl -Ilib -MBench -MMoose -e1
0.229s

Bench exports a single function, bench(), by default. To time a single sub, use: perl -MBench -e'bench sub { ... }'. By default it will call your sub at most 100 times or 1 second. Here's a sample output:

100 calls (12120/s), 0.0083s (0.0825ms/call)

To benchmark several subs: perl -MBench -e'bench {a=>sub{...}, b=>sub{...}}' or perl -MBench -e'bench [sub{...}, sub{...}]'. Sample output:

a: 100 calls (12120/s), 0.0083s (0.0825ms/call)
b: 100 calls (5357/s), 0.0187s (0.187ms/call)

Bench will automatically use Dumbbench if it's already loaded, e.g.: perl -MDumbbench -MBench -e'...'. Or you can force Bench to use Dumbbench: perl -MBench -e'bench sub { ... }, {dumbbench=>1}'.

That's about it currently.

Org::Parser

If you're like me, over the years you'll have had your todo lists scattered over multiple programs and places. First a simple text file with homebrewn format, then various Windows programs, then various Linux GUI programs, then back to Notepad and joe/gedit/kate, then various apps on cellphones, then pencil & paper (due to cellphones keep getting lost/stolen), then some cloud apps, then todo.txt, then finally org-mode. And if you're anything like me or many others, you'll find that org-mode is *it*.

I'm now in the (long, boring) process of consolidating everything in Org. For todo lists, contact lists, and even long documents and all journals/diaries. I've written a preliminary version of Org::Parser to help automate stuffs via the command line. It only supports the basic stuffs at the moment but has been able to parse all my *.org files.

The code is available on GitHub.