Q:

Evaluating Rascal's Performance?

I want to evaluate the performance of Rascal for a given rewrite system that I've written.  I'm wondering if there's a good way of doing it?
Ideally, I'd generate some compiled Java classes from the system and then run them manually against my inputs.  Is there an easy or recommended way to do it?
Cheers,

A:

One way to do this is to use the functions in the library util::Benchmark. Typically, you could write something like
cpuType( (){ call_the_function_I_want_to_observe(); } ). This will execute your function and print the cpu time used.
Note that Rascal can be executed in two ways: interpreted and compiled which makes a big difference when measuring performance. We are working hard at the moment to fully integrate the compiler in the Eclipse IDE, but a stand alone version is available as well. This can be called as java -Xss8m -jar rascal-0.8.4-SNAPSHOT.jar --compiledREPL followed by at least values for directories for sources (--src), and binaries (--bin). Here rascal-0.8.4-SNAPSHOT.jar (but most likely named differently) is downloaded from the https://update.rascal-mpl.org/console/rascal-shell-unstable.jar.
If you need more information, don't hesitate to ask for more details: this part of our tool chain is unfortunately still undocumented.

