profiling (was: Re: Octave Compiler)

[John W. Eaton]

On 18-Feb-2004, Przemek Klosowski <address@hidden> wrote:

| - good facilities for profiling (to find the weak/slow spots) and
|   debugging (NB, John, is there a way to instrument Octave to do a
|   high-level equivalent of gprof? Would that be a good idea? It
|   might simplify development work like fixing the concat slowness
|   that you did recently)

It would be possible to add some method of timing code to the
interpreter.  How fine-grained should the profile be?  Function calls
only or down to the individual statement level?  Should it only
profile the interpreted code or should it also time compiled code
(.oct files and built-in functions)?  At the level of compiled code,
you would only be able to get timings per function call unless you
actually compiled Octave for profiling and used the normal profiling
tools.  But from within Octave itself, we should be able to have some
profiling support.

jwe