Ari::web -> Blog -> Comparison between the oh-my-bash and baz plugin managers for GNU BASH

Today I'll be comparing two plugin managers for GNU BASH:

Testing environment

Fresh installation of Void Linux, GLibC edition

QEMU
- KVM
2048 MB of RAM
2 CPU cores
- Host CPU: Intel i3 8th generation
32 MB of VRAM
30 GB QCOW2 storage
- 500 MB Boot (vfat)
- 2 GB Swap (swap)
- 27.5 GB Root (ext4)
BASH version: 5.1.16
- Baz version: v5.3.0
- Omb version: https://github.com/ohmybash/oh-my-bash/commit/1c7f6d67ced42b5aa4e6ab84bdba0980f3ad688a

Collection of data

I just run this command:

for _ in $(seq 1000); do { /usr/bin/time -f '%e' bash -ic exit 2>&1 | tail -n 1; }; done >out.dat

This collects run time for 1000 runs

Data

I have been able to collect 4 files:

baz-agnoster.dat
baz-startup.dat
omb-agnoster.dat
omb-startup.dat

And you can probably tell what is what lol *-agnoster is 'loaded with agnoster plugin' (one of the more beefy bash themes) and 'startup' is vanilla loading time, no plugins, nothing

Statistics

Parsing data
Parsed all data

Statistics for 'baz'
  agnoster:
    Average: 0.021 s
    Median:  0.020 s
    Sum:     20.960 s / 1000 runs
    Graph:   'graphs/baz-agnoster-graph.png'
  startup:
    Average: 0.011 s
    Median:  0.010 s
    Sum:     11.330 s / 1000 runs
    Graph:   'graphs/baz-startup-graph.png'

Statistics for 'omb'
  agnoster:
    Average: 0.083 s
    Median:  0.070 s
    Sum:     83.190 s / 1000 runs
    Graph:   'graphs/omb-agnoster-graph.png'
  startup:
    Average: 0.118 s
    Median:  0.110 s
    Sum:     118.300 s / 1000 runs
    Graph:   'graphs/omb-startup-graph.png'

In context of 'agnoster' average baz load time is 0.06 s faster than omb, 0.05 s per median, in batches this makes a 62.23 s difference
In context of 'startup' average baz load time is 0.11 s faster than omb, 0.10 s per median, in batches this makes a 106.97 s difference

I just made a very shitty python script as I won't publish it rlly, but if you want it see #links, graphs are there too

General usage

I feel like oh-my-bash is much slower to even start up as vanilla for usage, it feels slow, it is slow ! Plus it's less flexible than baz with plugin, creation so at least for me personally, baz is a muuuccchh better option plus I don't have to wait a lot of time for my plugins to load, for example on my host it only takes 60-80 ms to load 14 plugins I have installed

Which is the better option

I'd say baz, this is why: