tasti-papi

This is another approach to benchmarking which uses counting of CPU instructions instead of time measurements. Underlying hardware counters are accessed using PAPI library so all hardware and OS support is inherited from there.

This approach is suitable for benchmarking CPU bound code. Instruction count is only proxy for code performance but it has advantage of being deterministic. Timing measurements are affected by concurrent workloads and require dedicated hardware in order to get precise measurements. Instruction counting is not affected by this so it could be run as part of CI and used to detect performance regressions.