[cairo] Benchmarking Cairo

[Nicholas Allen]

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Hi,

I couldn't find much benchmarking of Cairo (at least not for recent
versions). Is this not done before each release? If not, why not?
Otherwise someone would be able to commit some code that massively
slowed down Cairo without realizing it. It would also be nice to have
comparisons between the different back-ends to see how they match up
against each other and how they are improving over time.

I don't know too much about the development process of Cairo but I
assume it is possible to commit to trunk with a failing test or
performance problems. If so, I think Cairo could benefit from an
automatic gatekeeper workflow where a robot merges merge requests from
developers but only if it builds, the test suite passes and there are no
performance regressions. Developers would not be able to commit directly
to trunk. There are tools that make this relatively easy (eg Patch Queue
Manager). Looking through the change log I assume this is not currently
done (even manually) because there have been releases that didn't even
build. I know it would take a little while to set something like this up
but I think the effort would be worthwhile as it would save many
problems down the road.

Of course, that may be overkill though. I think at least regular
benchmarking and testing should be done (even if manually).

Cheers,

Nick
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