google
Introduce scientific notation for counters in console
Sometimes it becomes difficult to grasp immediately the differences between benchmarked functions that have a wide variance in a given counter.
The aforementioned readability problem is due to the usage of the SI standard by default.
This one below is an example where I am dealing with different functions to approximate sine, look at the absolute error calculated for each one:
It's not instantly obvious how much more precise the first function is, but it would be using scientific notation:
The usage might be as easy as:
state.counters["Foo"] = Counter(fooVal, benchmark::Counter::kScientificNotation);
i don't have a strong opinion either way, but seeing a PR (and the effect it has on some test cases) might be illuminating.
The print format does not really fit within the current counter flags. This is a yet another highlight that there is some missing extra abstraction for counters (just as timers) - the unit should be specifiable, including the printing specification and num/den strings.
@dominichamon As soon as I have have some spare time I will upload a draft implementation.
@LebedevRI Yeah I know about the fitting problem, I had to retouch it a little bit to make the notation fit.
Right know I kept the decimal precision to 5 digits just to be on par with the maximum mantissa digits shown by the HumanReadableFormat.