4 ms·
On the other hand, it's a lot more difficult to implement a sampling profiler than an instrumenting profiler on a bare metal target. There's definitely a niche
by AlotOfReading 4y ago
On the other hand, it's a lot more difficult to implement a sampling profiler than an instrumenting profiler on a bare metal target. There's definitely a niche for the latter and I've made use of the GCC instrumentation hooks for all sorts of analysis tools over the years.
- mhh__ 4y agoI suppose you're right but working on a compiler/language has made me very wary of "But what about embedded!" as a technical point. You can basically argue any point using embedded.
- AlotOfReading 4y agoThat's a totally fair objection and one I'm sensitive to as a vocal advocate for moving ES teams away from the custom crap that we've spent the past 40 years doing. I still think the weird limitations you get from "what about embedded" are often just obvious canaries for problems present throughout much of the vast diversity of computing. For example, sampling profilers used to have serious issues on WSL (where perf must still be manually compiled) and WINE. Having instrumentation hooks also makes things like AFL and custom sanitizers possible. The flexibility isn't always reasonable (e.g. don't assume little endian, don't assume 8-bit bytes), but there may be valid use cases that weren't considered at the toolchain/language level.