Superluminal
superluminal.eu · Company blog · on HN since 2018
The team behind the Superluminal performance profiler writes about profiling, callstack compression, font rendering, and sorting large data.
What HN saysHN commenters recommend the Superluminal profiler as a happy customer, praising its GUI, flame charts, Rust support, and advantage over the built-in ETW viewer.
16HN people shared it
4linked it in comments
12stories submitted
20story points
3 months agolast shared
2018people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 116xAA font rendering using coverage masks4 people · 7 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 2Superluminal: Profiling Reimagined4 people · 1 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 3Compressing callstacks: a bitpacked DAG powered by a keyless hashmap2 people · 4 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 4New CPU profiler available for Rust on Windows2 people · 2 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 5Superluminal – a new performance profiler for Windows1 people · 3 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 6Superluminal Profiler is now available for Linux1 people · 1 points · first shared 2026 · 1 comments on HN
- 716xAA font rendering using coverage masks, part I1 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 8Efficiently sorting gigabytes: the Deferred Merge Sort1 people · 1 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 9Features1 people · first shared 2021
What HN people wrote when they linked it
noxa · 2023-01-28
Having written similar tools like this in the past I pretty much exclusively use Tracy nowadays and let all my old stuff rot. The UI is snappy/fluid even with a tremendous amount of events, instrumentation is rich (zones/plots/memory tracking with timing, GPU events, logging, etc) and sampling is robust across all major platforms (Windows/Android/Linux/Mac) and the disassembly/analysis is as solid as most vendor tools. If wanting to integrate/use any tool like this I strongly recommend Tracy and then occasionally using vendor tooling where better (but platform/hardware limited). Having a single swiss-army knife perf tool makes it much easier for most of the team to learn and use it and leave the specialized knowledge of vendor tooling to those who need it.
There's also superluminal (https://superluminal.eu/), but it's closed source/paid - wolfpld (the Tracy author) is responsive and there's a decent set of contributors so switching to a black box on a part of the engineering process that is designed to avoid black boxes isn't very enticing. It also is sketchy/misleading about saying things like "Superluminal is the only sampling profiler that displays the profiling data in a visual UI." which is a big turn-off for someone who's been using/building tools like that for decades :)
ModernMech · 2024-12-04
Per the article's "Using the right profiling tools", I have gone through a similar profiling journey in Rust and found this tool very useful: https://superluminal.eu/rust/
Works on Windows, has a great GUI, shows pretty flame charts, really pleasant to use. Costs money but worth it.
forrestthewoods · 2024-07-07
> I can see the problem with Tracy, but need to add more profiling scopes to narrow it down.
If you can run on Windows try Superluminal.
https://superluminal.eu/
maccard · 2023-12-06
If you're working with ETW traces, SuperLuminal [0] (no affiliation just a happy customer) is leaps and bounds ahead of the built-in ETW viewer.
[0] https://superluminal.eu/