Visualizing the Performance of Higher-Order Programs

Profiling can provide the information needed to identify performance bottlenecks in a program, but the programmer must understand its relation to the program source in order to use this information. This is difficult due to the tremendous volume of data collected. Moreover, program transformations such as macro expansion and procedure inlining can obscure the relationship between the source and object code. Higher-order programs present additional challenges due to complex control flow and because they often consist of many small, often anonymous, procedures whose individual performance properties may be less interesting than their characteristics as a group. To address these challenges we have implemented a profiler and interactive profile visualizer and integrated them into an optimizing Scheme compiler. The profiler instruments target code and maintains correlation with the original source despite compiler optimizations that can eliminate, duplicate, or move code. The visualizer ope..