[ANN] viiite 0.2.0 Released

viiite version 0.2.0 has been released!

An alternative to Benchmark

* <http://blambeau.github.com/viiite>
* <http://github.com/blambeau/viiite>

Viiite brings tools to benchmark and analyze the complexity of your algorithms.
It has been designed as an alternative to Benchmark that let your benchmarks
evolve smoothly from simple measures to more complex infrastructures.

It has changed a lot since the last release, so try it and give us
some feedback!

Changes:

# 0.2.0

## Awesome new features

* Viiite is now able to work on complete benchmark suites (located in
  './benchmarks' and looking for '**/*.rb' files by default). Subcommands
  automatically resolve benchmark names passed as arguments. For example:

    ./benchmarks/
      bench_iteration.rb -> viiite run bench_iteration
      Array/
        bench_sort.rb -> viiite run Array/bench_sort

* Default behavior remains compatible with 0.1.0:
  * 'run', 'plot' and 'report' accept a benchmark file as first argument and
    bypass the benchmark suite in this case.
  * when invoked without any argument, 'plot' and 'report' assume a .rash stream
    on standard input

* For each benchmark, the results of the last run are saved in a cache. 'plot'
  and 'report' will use data in the cache if available or automatically run the
  benchmark.

* The default behavior may be controlled through the following main options:
  --suite=[FOLDER], --pattern=[GLOB], --[no-]cache=[FOLDER], --append,
--write. Example:

    # Run all benchmarks on all rubies, 10 times each, appending all results
    # in cache
    rvm exec viiite --append run --runs=10

## Enhancements to individual commands

* 'viiite run'

  * Added a --runs=NB option to run the same benchmark NB times. This allows
    keeping benchmarks clean; no NB.times{ ... } or range_over(1..NB, :run)
    for obtaining a representative sample are needed in the benchmark itself.
  * The previous option comes hand-in-hand with --run-key=KEY that allows
    specifying the attribute name for the run number (defaults to :run)
  * Without argument, runs all the benchmarks of the suite

* 'viiite plot'

  * Added --highcharts options; outputs a json array containing one hash for
    each chart, to be used as options Highcharts.Chart(...) (cfr. highcharts.js)
  * Added -d option, to debug; outputs the query result that would be used by
    the concrete --xxx formatter.

* 'viiite report'

  * output has been improved: user, system, total and real time are explicitely
    shown (different attributes/columns instead of one tms measure).
  * added a '--ff=FORMAT' option for float format of the different measures
    (defaults to %.6f)
  * added a '--stddev=[MEASURE]' option for displaying standard deviation over
    all regrouped runs (on a specific measure defaulting to tms.total)

## Other improvements

  * The garbage collector is started before running report{ ... } blocks
  * Viiite does not depend on benchmark (stdlib) anymore
  * Improved Viiite.which_ruby; it should always output something like
    '#{rubyname} #{version}#{patchlevel}' from now on

## Bug fixes

* Fixed a bug when using 'viiite report --regroup=x,y,z --hierarchy' with more
  than 2 regrouping attributes.

eregon & blambeau