How to restrict a BenchmarkDotNet job to run only on specific platforms?

Question

I am writing an F# port of a program I wrote in native code in the past. I used BenchmarkDotNet to measure its performance. I also placed a native EXE in the application's output directory.

I set my native program as the baseline benchmark and saw it was 5x faster than my F# program. Just as I expected!

However, the native program is posted on GitHub and distributed as a Win64 binary only. In case somebody using another OS tries to run it, it will crash.

So, how to specify that this benchmark will only run on 64-bit Windows?

Answer 1

In BenchmarkDotNet, there is a concept of Jobs. Jobs define how the benchmark should be executed. So, you can express your "x64 only" condition as a job. Note that there are several different 64x jit-compilers depends on runtime (LegacyJIT-x64 and RyuJIT-x64 for the full .NET Framework, RyuJIT-x64 for .NET Core, and Mono JIT compiler). You can request not only a specific platform but also a specific JIT-compiler (it can significantly affect performance), e.g.:

[<RyuJitX64Job>]
member this.MyAwesomeBenchmark () = // ...

In this case, a user will be notified that it's impossible to compile the benchmark for required platform.

Unfortunately, there is no way to require a specific OS for now (there is only one option: current OS). So, in your case, it's probably better to check System.Environment.Is64BitOperatingSystem and System.Environment.OSVersion at the start and don't run benchmarks on invalid operation systems.