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elisp

Is there a simple way to time a function call in elisp?

Yes, I am aware of the emacs profiler feature. I'm looking for something similar to the time keyword in bash, something like:

(time (myfunc))

which would return or print the time taken by the myfunc call. Is there such a thing?

Solution

  • benchmark.el provides benchmark-run and benchmark-run-compiled functions as well as a benchmark version to run interactively. The linked example:

    C-u 512 M-x benchmark (sort (number-sequence 1 512) '<)
Elapsed time: 0.260000s (0.046000s in 6 GCs)

    The timer used by all those functions is the benchmark-elapse macro, which you can also use directly if desired:

    ELISP> (require 'benchmark)
ELISP> (benchmark-elapse
         (sit-for 2))
2.00707889