Is Tracy complicated enough? Because it's imgui.
https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy
In Show HN: Shirei, cross-platform GUI framework in native Gowolfpld
tracy
C++2019–2026
wolfpld / tracy
tracy
Frame profiler
29Distinct people
37Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
17.1KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Frame profiler
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
For C++ applications, nothing beats Tracy’s flame graphs in value per dollar. We are using it at Adobe with great effect. It can handle mutex lock contention, runtime values…
MontagFTB used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year37 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-02-28 17:27:44 UTC to 2026-07-12 20:21:35 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 3 | 4 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 2 | 10 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 1 | 7 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Tracy Profiler
A real time, nanosecond resolution, remote telemetry, hybrid frame and sampling profiler for games and other applications.
Tracy supports profiling CPU (Direct support is provided for C, C++, Lua, Python and Fortran integration. At the same time, third-party bindings to many other languages exist on the internet, such as Rust, Zig, C#, OCaml, Odin, etc.), GPU (All major graphics/compute APIs: OpenGL, Vulkan, Direct3D 11/12, Metal, OpenCL, CUDA, WebGPU.), memory allocations, locks, context switches, automatically attribute screenshots to captured frames, and much more.
Documentation for usage and build process instructions
Releases containing the documentation (tracy.pdf) and compiled Windows x64 binaries (Tracy-<version>.7z) as assets
Changelog
Interactive demo
An Introduction to Tracy Profiler in C++ - Marcos Slomp - CppCon 2023
Introduction to Tracy Profiler v0.2
New features in Tracy Profiler v0.3
New features in Tracy Profiler v0.4
New features in Tracy Profiler v0.5
New features in Tracy Profiler v0.6
New features in Tracy Profiler v0.7
New features in Tracy Profiler v0.8
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
37 sourceshave you looked at tracy : https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy ?
it seems to at par, if not better than the other offering.
In Arm desktop: emulationThis reminds me that I was recently using tracy to profile a program and found their own list of valid grievances, altough it's a bit more GNOME inflicted: https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy/issues/505#issuecomment-136...
In KiCad and Wayland SupportTracy profiler new release 0.12.0
2 points · Open discussionI find the imgui UIs to be very high density (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui and the gallery issues) See for example the tracy profiler: https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy. It seems the game dev community has pretty powerful tools to understand and interrogate their work.
In Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?Look for tracing/profiling/binary analysis UIs:
- https://superuser.com/questions/1117466/using-windows-perfor...
- https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy
- https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex
3D modeling / CAD software:
- Blender/Rhino etc
- Similar for audio you can search for 'DAWs' (https://blog.landr.com/best-daw/)
Many examples on https://x.com/usgraphics/media only some software.
Not on the data side but can be useful just for contrast from todays software:
- https://www.zachtronics.com/wmp-skins/
- https://cari.institute/aesthetics
In Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?Tracy [1] is the first thing that comes to my mind, then RenderDoc [2].
After that Visual Studio while debugging. In general, I think graphical debuggers and profiling tools do a relatively good job of packing lots of information into many, small windows.
[1] https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy
[2] https://github.com/baldurk/renderdoc
In Ask HN: What are good high information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)Haven't worked with it, but based on initial look it's a quite different thing that stands closer to a frame-based profiler like Tracy (https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy).
As far as differences go:
Microprofile:
- frame-based
- needs a build system
- memory usage starts at 2 MB per thread
- runs 2 threads of its own
- provides system-specific info
- good support for GPU workloads
- provides live view
- seems like a good choice for gamedev / rendering
utl::profiler:
- no specific pipeline
- single include
- memory usage starts at approx. nothing and would likely stay in kilobytes
- doesn't run any additional threads
- fully portable, nothing platform specific whatsoever, just standard C++
- doesn't provide system-specific info, just pure timings
- seems like a good choice for small projects or embedded (since
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the only thing it needs is a C++ compiler)
I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for but I found https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy to work rather well. There is an integration for the tracing crate that can get you very far: https://lib.rs/crates/tracing-tracy. If you're just looking for a very high level report then this might be a bit too much detail.
In Rust: Doubling Throughput with Continuous Profiling and OptimizationWhile it doesn't capture every syscall, you can get pretty far with the (seemingly little known) Endpoint Security Framework: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/endpointsecurity
I cobbled together a little tool at my previous job that would capture a full trace of all process fork+exec and file opens, which would then present all of these events in the usual tracing UI (like you'd get when view a trace of a single program with Tracy[1] or Perfetto[2]).
We had a massive monorepo built with bazel and a heap of shell, and it wasn't clear which part of our code base was responsible for generating some mis-generated file. This tool gave me the whole inter-process call stack, complete with arguments and environment variables, letting me quickly find where and how to fix the problem.
It's such a nice tool to have that it kinda blows my mi
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nd that no one has openly published anything like it. By leveraging eBPF on Linux, the same UI could be used on both macOS and Linux. If I had more time and energy, I'd do it myself.
[1]: https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy
[2]: https://perfetto.dev/
https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy/issues/887
MSVC changed the mutex constructor to constexpr, breaking binary backward compatibility. They say WONTFIX, you must use the latest MSVCRT with the latest MSVC. But I have the latest MSVCRT installed? Whatever - a workaround was pushed to master yesterday.
In Tracy: A real time, nanosecond resolution frame profilerOn x86/AMD64 it uses CPU's TSC clock.
https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy/blob/master/public/client/T...
In Tracy: A real time, nanosecond resolution frame profilerTracy: A real time, nanosecond resolution frame profiler
198 points · Open discussionHmm? I haven't used Tracy yet but the demo trace they show at the URL linked on GitHub[1] sure looks like a trace from an application running on Linux. The documentation[2] also seems to reference what you need to run it on Linux, and the NixOS derivation[3] also suggests it runs on at least Linux and macOS, and I was able to run several of the binaries including the UI and capture binary. I still hesitate to doubt you on this because I haven't figured out how one is supposed to actually use it but it surely seems to support Linux. (I will definitely find a use for this, it looks amazing.)
[1]: https://tracy.nereid.pl/
[2]: https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy/releases/latest/download/tr...
[3]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-24.05/pkgs/devel...
In Logging all C++ destructors, poor mans run-time tracingI consider Tracy the state of the art for profiling C++ applications. It’s straightforward to integrate, toggle, gather data, analyze, and respond. It’s also open source, but rivals any product you’d have to pay for:
https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy
In Logging all C++ destructors, poor mans run-time tracingShowing the 15 most recent of 37 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.