HTML report documentation

[AntoniosBarotsis]

I was trying to benchmark some of my code and could not get the HTML report generated. I wasn't sure why up until I checked a previous project I worked on which specified the html_reports feature.

I feel like mentioning this in here would probably help any newcomers to the project. I could make a small PR for this, just let me know what you think of this!

I would add something like

"Criterion.rs can generate an HTML report displaying the results of the benchmark under
target/criterion/reports/index.html. Note that for this to happen you need to include the html_reports like so criterion = { version = "0.4.0", features = [ "html_reports" ]}.`"

[conradoplg]

I just got bit by this but figured that the solution was to explicitly pass --plotting-backend gnuplot (which annoyingly requires you to specify the benchmark to run, otherwise it tries to pass that flag to the library benchark which won't use criterion and it will fail; e.g. cargo bench --bench bench -- --plotting-backend gnuplot)

Investigating the source code I found out that html_reports just enables the HTML report generation by default, and not the ability to generate HTML reports which was what I assumed. So this is why both solutions work.

In short, yeah, the documentation could be clearer.

[AntoniosBarotsis]

@bheisler I'll just leave this up to you :)

[BartTerpstra]

got stuck on this as well.
this was the answer.
thank you 👍

[bazhenov]

Same situation. It would be nice to have this sort of information in the manual.