Re: Profiler: Implement output function 'profshow'

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 20 July 2011 11:40, Daniel Kraft <address@hidden> wrote:
> this is a follow-up patch on my last profiler changeset (which
> implemented profile.m). This adds a function 'profshow', which can
> be used to print a simple flat-profile table. As far as I understood
> the thread about Matlab output, there's no equivalent
> function(ality) there, so I hope my implementation is useful and
> looks ok. But of course, comments welcome!

I'm going to be talking to Matlab users and see what they think of
this implementation, but it's looking good to me.

> * Should I also print the 'IsRecursive' flag in the table? While it
> does not really fit into a flat profile table (IMHO), this would be
> a good place to show it.

I think it is too, go for it.

> * In general for the profiler, should I add tests?  I'm much in
> favour of testing as much as possible, but I'm not sure how to do
> this best. Maybe by some hierarchy of test-functions which call
> sleep at some points?  And then compare the profiler output with
> expected times up to some "epsilon"?

I don't think meaningful tests can be made other checking that it
errors out correctly when you give it the wrong output arguments.
Demos as you've been making are good. You can't predict what the times
will be as (1) this can in the end depend on a lot of Octave code that
is not part of the profiling code, so you would be testing a lot more
than just the profiler (2) depends on hardware.

- Jordi G. H.