Implement initial support for timing sections (`--json=timings`)
This PR implements initial support for emitting high-level compilation section timings. The idea is to provide a very lightweight way of emitting durations of various compilation sections (frontend, backend, linker, or on a more granular level macro expansion, typeck, borrowck, etc.). The ultimate goal is to stabilize this output (in some form), make Cargo pass `--json=timings` and then display this information in the HTML output of `cargo build --timings`, to make it easier to quickly profile "what takes so long" during the compilation of a Cargo project. I would personally also like if Cargo printed some of this information in the interactive `cargo build` output, but the `build --timings` use-case is the main one.
Now, this information is already available with several other sources, but I don't think that we can just use them as they are, which is why I proposed a new way of outputting this data (`--json=timings`):
- This data is available under `-Zself-profile`, but that is very expensive and forever unstable. It's just a too big of a hammer to tell us the duration it took to run the linker.
- It could also be extracted with `-Ztime-passes`. That is pretty much "for free" in terms of performance, and it can be emitted in a structured form to JSON via `-Ztime-passes-format=json`. I guess that one alternative might be to stabilize this flag in some form, but that form might just be `--json=timings`? I guess what we could do in theory is take the already emitted time passes and reuse them for `--json=timings`. Happy to hear suggestions!
I'm sending this PR mostly for a vibeck, to see if the way I implemented it is passable. There are some things to figure out:
- How do we represent the sections? Originally I wanted to output `{ section, duration }`, but then I realized that it might be more useful to actually emit `start` and `end` events. Both because it enables to see the output incrementally (in case compilation takes a long time and you read the outputs directly, or Cargo decides to show this data in `cargo build` some day in the future), and because it makes it simpler to represent hierarchy (see below). The timestamps currently emit microseconds elapsed from a predetermined point in time (~start of rustc), but otherwise they are fully opaque, and should be only ever used to calculate the duration using `end - start`. We could also precompute the duration for the user in the `end` event, but that would require doing more work in rustc, which I would ideally like to avoid :P
- Do we want to have some form of hierarchy? I think that it would be nice to show some more granular sections rather than just frontend/backend/linker (e.g. macro expansion, typeck and borrowck as a part of the frontend). But for that we would need some way of representing hierarchy. A simple way would be something like `{ parent: "frontend" }`, but I realized that with start/end timestamps we get the hierarchy "for free", only the client will need to reconstruct it from the order of start/end events (e.g. `start A`, `start B` means that `B` is a child of `A`).
- What exactly do we want to stabilize? This is probably a question for later. I think that we should definitely stabilize the format of the emitted JSON objects, and *maybe* some specific section names (but we should also make it clear that they can be missing, e.g. you don't link everytime you invoke `rustc`).
The PR be tested e.g. with `rustc +stage1 src/main.rs --json=timings --error-format=json -Zunstable-options` on a crate without dependencies (it is not easy to use `--json` with stock Cargo, because it also passes this flag to `rustc`, so this will later need Cargo integration to be usable with it).
Zulip discussions: [#t-compiler > Outputting time spent in various compiler sections](https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/131828-t-compiler/topic/Outputting.20time.20spent.20in.20various.20compiler.20sections/with/518850162)
MCP: https://github.com/rust-lang/compiler-team/issues/873
r? ``@nnethercote``
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