Profiling in the Presence of Optimization and Garbage Collection

Abstract:

Profiling the execution of programs can be a great help in tuning their performance, and programs written in functional languages are no exception. The standard techniques of call-counting and statistical (interrupt-driven) execution time measurement work well, but with some modification. In particular,
the program counter is not the best indicator of "current function." Our profiler inserts explicit increment and assignment statements into the intermediate representation, and is therefore very simple to implement and completely independent of the code-generator.