Support --time-unit microsecond about hyperfine HOT 3 CLOSED

Elsewhere, IIRC, it was stated that execution times exhibit too much variance for this to be useful

This sounds like something I might have written in the past, but it's probably not true anymore. Previously, hyperfine always needed to launch a new shell for each benchmark execution. We do correct times and subtract that shell spawning overhead, but my feeling was that this procedure added noise in the order of 100µs — 1ms, which is why I recommended not to benchmark programs running faster than 5 ms — just to be cautious with my claims on what this program can do.

With the new --shell=none/-N option of hyperfine, that restriction is now gone. We do not need intermediate shells to run the benchmarkee. So I can certainly imagine that your observation …

I found that for very short-running programs with a significant number of repeated runs, I was able to reliably characterize statistical distributions down into the hundreds or even tens of microseconds range

… is correct, and I would definitely agree that we should add microseconds as a new option for the --time-unit argument.

Thank you for your feedback.

from hyperfine.

This is now supported in https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine/releases/tag/v1.18.0

from hyperfine.

Awesome, thanks!

from hyperfine.