microfetch/README.md
vali f1e8ca8773
add benchmarking for individual functions (#9)
* add benchmarking

* update README to include benchmarking of individual functions

* README: formatting

* README: add link to Criterion's getting_started

* shell.nix: add gnuplot

Since Criterion.rs uses gnuplot to generate nice plots, add it to the
shell.

* Cargo.toml: fixed microfetch binary name

* benchmark.rs: fix benchmark function's name

* Update README.md

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Co-authored-by: raf <raf@notashelf.dev>
2024-08-15 17:43:39 +00:00

4.4 KiB

https://deps.rs/repo/github/notashelf/microfetch

Microfetch

Stupidly simple, laughably fast fetch tool. Written in Rust for speed and ease of maintainability. Runs in a fraction of a millisecond and displays most of the nonsense you'd see posted on r/unixporn or other internet communities. Aims to replace fastfetch on my personal system, but probably not yours. Though, you are more than welcome to use it on your system: it's pretty fast...

latest demo

Features

  • Fast
  • Really fast
  • Minimal dependencies
  • Actually really fast
  • Cool NixOS logo (other, inferior, distros are not supported)
  • Reliable detection of following info:
    • Hostname/Username
    • Kernel
      • Name
      • Version
      • Architecture
    • Current shell (from $SHELL, trimmed if store path)
    • Current Desktop (DE/WM/Compositor and display backend)
    • Memory Usage/Total Memory
    • Storage Usage/Total Storage (for / only)
    • Shell Colors
  • Did I mention fast?

Installation

Microfetch is packaged in nixpkgs. You can get it through the unstable channel for the time being. The Nix flake can also be used for bleeding-edge builds.

Non-Nix users will have to build Microfetch with cargo.

Microfetch is currently not available anywhere else. Though, does it really have to be?

Benchmarks

Microfetch's performance is mostly hardware-dependant, however, the overall trend seems to be < 2ms on any modern (2015 and after) CPU. Below are the benchmarks with Hyperfine on my desktop system.

Command Mean [ms] Min [ms] Max [ms] Relative Written by raf?
microfetch 1.3 ± 0.0 1.3 1.4 1.00 yes
pfetch 254.2 ± 4.8 246.7 264.9 191.97 ± 7.10 no
neofetch 735.4 ± 9.5 721.1 752.8 555.48 ± 19.08 no
fastfetch 31.9 ± 0.8 30.8 33.8 24.08 ± 0.98 no

As far as I'm concerned, Microfetch is faster than almost every fetch tool there is. The only downside of using Rust is introducing more "bloated" dependency trees and increasing build times. The latter is easily mitigated with Nix's binary cache, though.

To benchmark individual functions, Criterion.rs is used. See Criterion's Getting Started Guide for details or just run cargo bench to benchmark all features of Microfetch

Customizing

You can't*.

Why?

Customization, of any kind, is expensive: I could try reading environment variables, parse command-line arguments or read a configuration file but all of those increment execution time and resource consumption by a lot.

Really?

To be fair, you can customize Microfetch by... Well, patching it. It's not the best way per se, but it will be the only way that does not compromise on speed.

Contributing

I will, mostly, reject feature additions. This is not to say you should avoid them altogether, as you might have a really good idea worth discussing but as a general rule of thumb consider talking to me before creating a feature PR.

Contributions that help improve performance in specific areas of Microfetch are welcome. Though, prepare to be bombarded with questions.

Hacking

A Nix flake is provided. nix develop to get started. Direnv users may simply run direnv allow to get started.

Non-nix users will need cargo and gcc installed on their system, see Cargo.toml for available release profiles.

Thanks

Huge thanks to everyone who took the time to make pull requests or nag me in person about current issues.

License

Microfetch is licensed under GPL3. See the license file for details.