Compilation-ignoring timer?

Internals & Design
1

Does Julia have, or would it be possible to add, a compilation-ignoring timer?

Use case: setting a time limit for running a function, as is common for optimizers. The first execution will be necessarily longer than the later executions due to compilation, but you may want to set a time limit that’s a lot shorter than that first execution.

A workaround is to ensure it is compiled prior to optimization, but that’s a bit annoying to remember to do each time.

A bit easier would be if packages that need to track time could do so in a way that tries to ignores compilation time. And for that, you’d need a timer that can be informed that Julia is currently compiling.

2

I’m guessing this isn’t implemented because it wouldn’t be as useful as it seems: even if you don’t count the compilation time towards the measured time, the compilation would still interfere with the performance so the resulting timings wouldn’t be completely relevant.

EDIT: On the other hand, it’s weird that we have @timev which tells us how much of the total elapsed time was spent compiling, but @timed doesn’t give us that data.

3

GitHub - JuliaCI/BenchmarkTools.jl: A benchmarking framework for the Julia language is the defacto standard package for this.

4

This package is for interactive benchmarking, which is not what I’m asking for. All it does to “ignore compilation” is to pre-run the method.

5

To the first, I don’t think an imperfect adjustment is bad. If more could be done to account for other first-run delays, that would be great.