Attabench

What is Attabench?

Attabench is a microbenchmarking app for macOS, designed to measure and visualize the performance of Swift code.

This app is for microbenchmarking low-level algorithms with one degree of freedom (usually size). It works by repeatedly performing the same operation on random data of various sizes, while continuously charting the results in nice plots. Attabench’s default log-log plots are ideal for seeing your algorithm’s performance at a glance.

Attabench was originally created to supply nice log-log charts for my dotSwift 2017 talk and Optimizing Collections book. At the time, it seemed easier to build a custom chart renderer from scratch using Core Graphics than to mess with a bunch of CSV files and pivot tables in Excel. (It has to be noted though that this opinion has been somewhat weakened during the implementation process.)Attabench was made in a hurry for a single use case, so its code is what polite people might call a little messy. But it’s shockingly fun to play with, and the graphs it produces are chock full of strange and wonderful little mysteries.

Overview