Version 7 (modified by cotto, 12 years ago)

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This page is a personal todo list for me, cotto. Others are welcome to take on any tasks mentioned here, but the primary purpose for this page is to keep track of what I intend to do. Because of that, I haven't spend much effort on breaking tasks down into bite-size chunks or made much of a concrete plan. If you are interested in helping but don't know where to start, catch me on #parrot and I'll put you to work.

profiling:

  • Get to know the PackFile code.
    • Read through the bytecode pdd (13) and make it match the current implementation.
    • Focus on annotations, but it wouldn't be a bad thing to lower the PackFile bus number.
  • test profiling output (pprof format)
  • test pprof to callgrind conversion and callgrind-style output
  • Figure out a nice way to integrate annotations into the profile.
  • Switch to a Configure.pl-based approach for finding the appropriate timing functions.
  • Create an efficient binary output format with optional compression, similar to NYTProf.
  • Optimize the profiling runloop code.
  • Consider moving the Callgrind output code into the profiling runcore.
  • Abstract output in the profiling runcore to minimize the amount of code that cares about the output format.
  • Fix CLI argument parsing so that options can be passed to the profiling runcore.
    • It'd also be nice if parrot were smart enough to treat -Rp or -Rprof to the same as -Rprofiling
      • This is a trivial change to compilers/imcc/main.c
  • Annotations are slow. Make it possible to avoid a Schlemiel the Painter algorithm by getting annotations from bytecode iteratively.

Questions:

  • What are "basic blocks" in Callgrind's format? Callgrind's docs aren't at all helpful here. RTFS applies.
    • A basic block is a straight line piece of code without any branches or branch targets. It's the smallest individual unit of code to which you can apply a compiler optimization.

profiling testing todo:

  • figure out what to test
  • actual profiling runcore output (does it work, is the output valid)
  • pprof2cg (split into a module, test individual components, multiple output formats (when implemented))
    • The Callgrind output code may end up in C since nqp is way too slow and even the Perl 5 version isn't very fast. This would make testing more interesting, though I'd still have a way to produce either the pprof or the callgrind formatted output.
  • stats output should also be tested since it's nice for debugging (note to self: ???)
  • specific test cases
    • stupid hello world
    • profiling a pbc without line information (if possible)
    • proper namespace support
    • threads